How to use dooblet.com in your web-applications

(Dooblet's API and mash-up guidelines for web-developers)

Q: What is this page about?

Answer: dooblet.com is a web-service helping users to find the best alternatives to a very broad range of subjects. The portions of a search result could be fetched from dooblet.com and be incorporated (mashed-up) into a web-page shown to a web-surfer. Below is explained how to do it right.

Q: Are the data feeds from dooblet.com free?

Answer: Yes. The data feeds from dooblet.com are absolutely for free. See details in the data feeds' license.

Q: Any working example?

Answer: Sure. You can take a look at the simple ready to use examples: for jQuery, for PrototypeJS or for plain JavaScript. It should be enough for you to mashup things with your favorite JS-framework (including my favorite Dojo). You are welcome to modify the look & feel on your own. You are 99% free here, please, read the license for details.

Q: What are the limitations?

Answer:

The data feeds should be fetched from end-user's browsers, not from the web-servers.
The data feeds are currently limited to 2 best alternatives only. We'll consider to increase this in future.

See details in the data feeds' license.

Q: What are the data feed formats supported?

Answer: JSON only. We see no reasons to use other formats, because currently we are primarily oriented on data fetching from browsers only. Here is the data feed example for the seach term 'linux':


myfunc({ 
    "title"       : "Best two alternatives to 'linux'", 
    "description" : "This data feed is exported under the following license: http://dooblet.com/feeds/data-export-license-1-0.html , if you do not accept this license do not use this data feed. All rights reserved. Valery A.Khamenya",
    "generator"   : "http://dooblet.com/",
    "link"        : "http://dooblet.com/feeds/top2alt/_/linux/jsonp/?jsoncallback=myfunc",
    "license"     : { "URL" : "http://dooblet.com/feeds/data-export-license-1-0.html" },
    "number_of_alternatives" : "18",
    "number_of_companions"   : "4",
    "top2alternatives"       : [{ "alternative" : "windows", "stars" : "5"}, { "alternative" : "unix", "stars" : "4"}]
    })

The field names are self-explaining.

Q: Can I finally have an URL to dooblet feeds, please?

Answer: Oh... All right. Web-services are difficult to use without the URLs... The URL is structured like following:

http://dooblet.com/feeds/top2alt/[language code]/[search term]/[format]/?jsoncallback=[callback function name]

[language code] should be replaced with one of four values:
  en - English, 
  de - German, 
  ru - Russian, 
  _  - "neutral" language, which means a language-independent content 

[search term] a search term you are looking alternatives for.

[format] a data format the result should be returned in. Currently only "jsonp" is accepted.

[callback function name] whatever name you'd like for the jsonp callback function

Example:
the following URL returns top 2 alternatives for the search term "linux", which are common for all languages and the result is returned in JSONP format with the JSONP-callback function named "myfunc":
http://dooblet.com/feeds/top2alt/_/linux/jsonp/?jsoncallback=myfunc

The data returned with this call is displayed in the answer right above.

John, thanks for the question I have forgotten! :)

Q: What if my question is still not answered?

Answer: just drop us an e-mail at


  dooblet AT gmail DOT com