When learning a new programming language you will often start with a "Hello World" example, that will take you through some of the basic concepts of the language and the tools available. You can think of this tutorial as a "Hello Robot World" example, where the goal is to let you create, publish and use your very first openkapow robot. We will also cover the basic concepts of robot building and some of the tools available through the openkapow community. This tutorial goes through things on a very high level to give you a quick overview, you can find more tutorials that goes into much more depth in the
Tutorials section.
Basic Concepts
Before starting you might want to familiarize you with a few of the basic concepts we use when we are talking about robot in the openkapow community.
RoboMaker is a visual development environment where you create
robots that consists of
steps working on the content of web pages. Robots can be run in RoboMaker and can be uploaded to the
openkapow server where they are public available.
The rest of this tutorial requires that you have installed RoboMaker openkapow edition and registered as a user on the openkapow community site. If you have not then please Join our Community and download RoboMaker.
Creating a robot
You first robot will be a REST service robot. Normally REST robots will take some kind of input, process one or more web pages, and return an output in form of a XML document. For simplicity we will do without the input in this tutorial.
When starting up RoboMaker you will be met with a wizard guiding you through the first steps of creating a robot. For now you will need to choose the REST service robot type. When asked for start url for the robot you can type in "http://demo.openkapow.com/helloworld.html". Skip creating any input variables and create a single output variable named "myFirstOutput". This should give you screen similar to the one below.
[Click on the image to enlarge]
In this simple example we will assign the text in the gray box to the output variable named "myFirstOutput". To do this simply right click on the text "Hello Robot World" and select "Extraction", "extract text..." and then select "RESTOutput.value1 (myFirstOutput)".
[Click on the image to enlarge]
You now have a very basic robot that consists of only three simple steps:
- In the first a web page is loaded.
- The second step selects a piece of text on the page and assigns it to a field in the output object.
- The third and final step returns the output object.
If you want you can try to run this robot in the build-in debugger be pressing the icon 
.
Saving and publishing a robot
Robots can be saved on you local hard disk where they will show up with a .robot extension. When you you feel you robot is ready to be deployed on the openkapow server you can publish it simply be pressing the 
icon. You will be asked to select a category and supply a few tags to help other users find you robots.
[Click on the image to enlarge]
After you have uploaded your robot you will see a link like http://service.openkapow.com/tutorial/helloworld.rest. The robot can now be executed from a normal browser or from within a program (in for example PHP, JSP, ASP, Javascript or Ruby on Rails). All robots published on openkapow are available for anyone to download and run, see for example the robot created in this tutorial.
What's next?
You can learn much more about creating robots in the the Tutorials section and read more about the basic concepts in Learn about robots. Good tutorials to get started with are:
Also take a look in the Robot Gallery to see what other people have created and check out the forums to get help and share ideas with other developers. To get an idea of what kind of mashups it is possible to build with openkapow you should take a look in the Demos section.