pydataportability.discovery 0.4

Christian Scholz

Introduction

pydataportability.discovery is a component for discovering resource description documents. These are XRD documents describing a resource and optionally pointing to related resources. One use case is the webfinger project where XRD is used to store information about a user. The URI identifying the user is e.g. acct:[e-mail] and this discovery component is able to retrieve information about the user via LRDD.

Installation

The easiest way to install it is via easy_install:

easy_install pydataportability.discovery

It is recommended to do this inside a virtualenv

Simple usage

After installing you will have 2 new commands in your path (or virtualenv’s bin/ directory): discover and webfinger. These are just example scripts though. Both do discovery on the URI you feed in but the latter will check for webfinger-relationships only and will additionally check if you passed in a user identifier starting with acct: which is the proposed scheme of the webfinger protocol. If you didn’t, it’s adding it for you.

Here is an example:

$ webfinger [e-mail]

Subject:  acct:[e-mail]

Rels:  ['http://portablecontacts.net/spec/1.0']
URIs: ['http://www-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/api/people/']
Media Types: []
Prio: 0
Templates: []

So this mainly prints the contents of the discovered XRD document. Note that the user you are testing it with needs to enable this at Google. Check out the webfinger homepage and mailing list for more information.

Documentation

You can find the documentation for this component at http://dataportability.net

Warning

Note that the XRD specification and the webfinger protocol are under heavy development and likely to change.

License

This project is released under a BSD license:

Copyright (c) 2009, Christian Scholz All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

• Neither the name of the author nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Changelog

0.4 - 12 Oct 2009

• Initial release