Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform

9.3. EventFu: Finding Eventful Events

Have you ever been in a foreign city without anything to do? Have you ever seen an advertisement about a concert but forgotten where it will happen and when? EventFu is here to help: it connects to the Eventful service at http://eventful.com/ to retrieve information and keeps you updated about events that are interesting to you.

Eventful is an event database with an extensive web API which can be found at http://api.eventful.com. EventFu uses only one of the provided functions, event search, and shows a list of events that match the user's preferences. The list is updated at regular intervals so new events appear on the list after a short delay once they have been listed in the service.

Requests are made to the Eventful API using a simple URL-encoded interface similarly to the previous example. However, Eventful supports responses in JSON, so the results can be converted directly to a convenient data structure. To use the service, you have to request an application key from Eventful at http://api.eventful.com/keys/new. The key is a long random string not unlike the Yahoo! Application ID.

Note that the json module is needed in the example. It is not included in the standard PyS60 distribution; see Section 8.2.2 for how to install this module.

EventFu contains several features that are worth noticing:

• It presents a straightforward mapping between the UI and the web API – for example, the event description form is constructed on the fly based ...