DAPPER
Andrew put me on to this today after he discovered it over the weekend.
Dapper allows you to create a “black box” (a Dapp) for any data source on the Internet. The Dapp produces XML which you can use programatically in whatever way you like. Additionally, Dapper provides you with the ability to transform this XML into other formats.
As if to prove a point, I managed to knock together an RSS wrapper for the ESA Vacancies page. You can consume the feed I created here. Obviously the big test will be to come back over the next few days to this feed and see if it actually updates 
The choice of example is one that constantly frustrates former research colleagues in that ESA still haven’t supplied a means by whihc one can subscribe to the vacancy list to be alerted to posts relevant to you. I know they were using an older version of Fatwire for their web CMS, but would have thought they could have knocked up a tactical app to manage this by now 
No doubt Andrew will be way ahead of me on putting together some really useful bits and bobs that we could actually use in the future. As it stands, I’m really rather impressed with the service. It would be nice to know what other folks think of the service - though to me it already seems pretty well subscribed to, with a number of fair apps available.
Not exactly a replacement for IBM Content Integrator, or Kapow’s Robosuite when it comes down to it, perhaps. That said, it’s a great (currently free) way of testing out some screen scraping and rendering the output through perhaps more options off the bat than you’d get from the major content/screen-scraping apps.
I stand to be corrected
Tags: fatwire, kapow, screen_scraping, web_cms, xml