Wufoo kung fu

Hi mashers,

I got very excited last week about a new discovery and just couldn't help myself. It was just crying out to be used in a mashup somehow.

I got a tweet from Dion Hinchcliffe (the man singularly responsible for my interest in mashups) that mentioned something new happening on a website with "Wufoo" in the URL.  With a name like that, I couldn't help but be curious, and so browsed my way to their site to see what they were all about.  The team at Wufoo.com provide an online HTML form building and data capture service and I'd have to say I was impressed from the moment I stepped on to their site. It is very cool and it's so simple to create a form that I immediately saw an opportunity for it in our own organisation.

But what really got my attention, was the API that Wufoo provide to access their service. The Query API allows you to access the stored data collected from one of your forms via HTTP. You know where I'm going with this! As soon as I saw this I thought mashup ... <directinvoke> ... and grab all the entries from a form to use in other processes.

Bearing in mind, John Crupi's recent blog about building Apps, I decided to try and write this as a mashup that could be published and maintained for the benefit of everyone.

The wufooQueryAPI (V1.0) mashup has been published to the Presto Cloud and should be available for use by any of the Cloud Users.

You can see how the mashup works as I've set up a demonstration mashlet that displays the data returned from a Wufoo form that I created just for this purpose. You can see the mashlet here and access the Wufoo form here.

I will post all of the code over on a Code Samples page for anyone to have it look at, and will provide a bit more explanation on how it works.

I'd like to maintain this code and ensure we incorporate changes and suggestions, as well as fix any bugs that might crop up.

If you haven't heard or seen anything on Wufoo, I'd encourage you to have a look, and of course if you are reading this blog, chances are you've already got an interest in mashups and Presto ... so need I say more.

Happy mashing everyone.

Cheers, Innes