London Tube Status - now from Google App Engine
I’ve been meaning to reignite the London Tube status stuff I’ve worked on in the past. Well, we have liftoff. londontubestatus.appspot.com provides an XML file listing the current status of the London transport system. Don’t pummel it to hard - Google are pretty resistant to you hitting their server, but for the sake of others using the service, cache goddamnit!
And don’t rely on it not changing. I will be changing the output and some of the mechanics as we go along. I wanted to get it out there so people could play with it. Plans include station name parsing, content-negotiation (so you can ask for a particular format and get it back like that), being able to get one line only and various other bits of magic.
App Engine seems like a good place to put it, since Google seems to, well, be able to run servers much better than most, and the response times are shit-hot fast.
Source code for the underlying class will be available soon, and I’m planning to improve it in other ways. Hopefully in a month or two, I can freeze the output - so that you’ll get broadly the same XML coming out every time (and there will probably be a RELAX NG schema available).
