weboob-devel/docs/source/overview.rst
2010-11-25 16:39:05 +01:00

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Overview
========
Weboob (Web Out Of Browsers) provides:
* :doc:`applications` to interact with websites
* :doc:`backends`, each one handles a specific website
* a :doc:`core library <api/core/index>` providing all the features needed by backends
* :doc:`tools <api/tools/index>` to help develop backends and applications
Weboob is written in Python and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Why using Weboob?
-----------------
* you get essential information faster
* you can write scripts using weboob to automate tasks
* it extends websites features
* it helps blind people using crappy websites
Capabilities
------------
The core library defines capabilities. They represent features common to various websites.
For example, http://www.youtube.com and http://www.dailymotion.com are both videos
providers: Weboob defines the ``ICapVideo`` capability.
Each backend interfaces a website and implements one or many of these
capabilities. Backends can be configured, which means that the end-user can
provide personal information to access the underlaying website (login/password
for example).
Multi-backend call
------------------
The core library provides a mechanism allowing applications to call many backends in
parallel, in a multi-threaded way.
For example, one could search a video on many providers websites.
Applications
------------
Applications are toolkit-agnostic. They can use Gtk, Qt or just be text-only, more adapted to reuse data through pipes.