I’ve been playing around with Drapper for a while now, and I honestly have to say - its one of the coolest little web apps I’ve seen in a long time in terms of the “Wow I have so many bloody uses for that!!” factor! I have lost track of how many times I have had to preg_match() [arrgghh!] myself towards some nice output from a service which doesn’t have an API (read: Xbox Live Gamercards), and now, this simple service does most of the work for me:

Basic concept: You enter the “Dapp Factory“, give it a few URLs from the same page of a site, but different content (i.e. a user profile page), select the content you want to extract, define some variables (i.e. http://gamercard.xbox.com/{Query}.card) and save your new Dapp. You can now choose everything from a simple flash widget to put in the sidebar of your blog to a XML or JSON response so you can mash things up abit!

Dapper uses the idea that everything you make should be shared with other users, and in doing so they are creating a repository of pre-made Dapps created by other users - there are literally thousands of pre-made Dapps to be used already from all sorts of sources, and I expect that number to grow to incorporate every single thing you could ever possibly want to extract from popular websites! The things it could be used for seems limitless!

Go have a play - you now have even more ingredients for your Mash-ups! Woohoo!