The Power of Wolfram Alpha - Now in a .NET API

Update: Here is the direct link to WolframAlpha.net.

In an ongoing project of mine, I needed access to a good source of information that is free, powerful and provides some sort of API. My first thought was on Wolfram|Alpha, a powerful search engine that have thousands of databases filled with useful information and a really great interpreter that tries to guess what you mean by the 22th president of the USA. If you have not yet tried Wolfram|Alpha, I highly encourage you to take a look at it.

 
The results from Wolfram|Alpha when looking up "Google stock"

Wolfram|Alpha has a REST based API that outputs beautiful XML data ready to parse. They really put some work into making it easy to use, so I though it would be a no-brainer to find an existing C# library that would parse it and give me objects that I could work with. However, it turns out that there are only a few of them, and only a fraction of those support the 2.0 API that Wolfram|Alpha introduced back in January 2011. I decided to code an API myself that could be easily extended with new features and would provide me with the full API.

I present to you, the all new WolframAlpha.net API. It is based on the open source RestSharp framework for parsing the XML data, so a big thanks goes out to the guys behind it for an awesome job.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

.NET Compression Libraries Benchmark

Image
I often find myself needing a compression library in a software development project, and after a few tests with disappointing results I usually fall back to spawning 7Zip as an external process. This time however, the application specification prohibits any data written to disk, which 7Zip needs to do in order to work correctly. I needed to do everything in memory, and so I had to test some of the C# libraries available for compression as well as the different compression algorithms. Here is a full list of the tested libraries: .NET DeflateStream ICSharpCode SharpZip Zlib.NET DotNetZip Managed LZMA LZMA SDK QuickLZ    Compression 101 Before I get to the results of the benchmark, I think it is important to understand the different archive formats and compression algorithms in order to compare the results with other benchmarks/and or tests. Lets get to it! A compression algorithm can be compared to a small machine that takes in some data, do some math on it and...
Read more

Reducing the size of self-contained .NET Core applications

Just for note keeping, I've written down some methods of reducing the size of a .NET Core application. I thought others could use it as well, so here you go. Original Size First off, let's see how much disk space a self-contained 'hello world' application takes up. > dotnet new console > dotnet publish -r win-x86 -c release Size: 53.9 MB -  yuck! Trimming Microsoft has built a tool that finds unused assemblies and removes them from the distribution package. This is much needed since the 'netcoreapp2.0' profile is basically .NET Framework all over again, and it contains a truckload of assemblies our little 'hello world' application don't use. > dotnet new console > dotnet add package Microsoft.Packaging.Tools.Trimming -v 1.1.0-preview1-25818-01 > dotnet publish -r win-x86 -c release /p:TrimUnusedDependencies=true Size: 15.8 MB Much better! Although, we have only removed unused assemblies - what about unused...
Read more

Convex polygon based collision detection

Image
A lot of people have asked me: Why use a convex polygon only engine like Box2D? In this post I will provide some info on why convex polygons is the optimal polygon type to use. What does convex mean? Convex polygons needs to satisfy the following requirements: All internal angles must be below 180 degrees Every line segment between two vertices can be contained fully inside or at the edge the polygon A non-convex polygon is called a concave polygon and it must have an internal angle measuring greater than 180 degrees. As you might have thought about yourself; concave polygons can be quite handy. Convex-only engines can’t represent a simple player polygon like Pac-Man . Why use convex-only? There are really only one big juicy reason: performance Physics engines are able to take quite a few shortcuts and use cheap algorithms to determine the closest vertex, shortest distance and a lot more. An algorithm like Separating Axis Theorem and the Gilbert – Johnson –...
Read more