Comments on: Browsing iTunesU without intalling iTunes

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:34:03 +0000

iTunesU has had some major changes recently, some pages still serve XML while many others are now HTML.
I’ve started working on a web service that currently correctly parses the XML to web-viewable html…
https://bitbucket.org/LBryan/web-itunesu/wiki/Home

By: Boris Fritscher

Boris Fritscher — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:12:59 +0000

Hi it seems there is a new kind of page in iTunesU, I finally check it out on a machine, which had iTunes installed. The pages are different in the sens that they look more like a real webpage and have the playlist directly embedded in the page. I will have to check out the xml behind, to see if i can adapat it to my script. Unfortunately, I do not have time for this right now.

By: fer

fer — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:13:32 +0000

Strange, but the MIT link doesn’t work to me… Do I have to install/compile something? Thanks!

By: Boris Fritscher

Boris Fritscher — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:59:26 +0000

Hi,
the script is provided as-is. full source is available at http://github.com/bfritscher/www-itunesu

for just using the script without installing it yourself you can test
http://1.latest.unil-podcast.appspot.com/index.groovy?handle= and append the itunesU url page you wish to see. The link for your university, is certainly published somewhere on your universitie’s page. Otherwise you will have to guess it.

the format is http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/universitywebpage

for example:
http://1.latest.unil-podcast.appspot.com/index.groovy?handle=http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/unil.ch

http://1.latest.unil-podcast.appspot.com/index.groovy?handle=http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/mit.edu

I hope this helps

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:29:23 +0000

Um… I spoke too soon. How am I supposed to use this? How am I supposed to open it? I tried saving it as a .js file, and as a .htm file, but firefox wouldn’t open it either way. How am I supposed to give it the URL that it needs?

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:25:04 +0000

THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

I loathe how Apple has tricked so many universities who are trying to give to the community into giving to Apple instead. And I loathe how iTunes insists on running in the background at all times, draining CPU and memory, regardless of whether I’m using it or not. There’s no good reason for it to do that.

By: Marco

Marco — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:17:15 +0000

That’s great. It worked. Here a short report of my story: http://macintoshnotes.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/itunesu-without-itunes/

Thanks a million!

By: iTunesU without iTunes « My Mac Notes

iTunesU without iTunes « My Mac Notes — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:12:20 +0000

[...] not work on my Ubuntu testing machine! Finally I found a solution created by Boris Fritscher and documented in his blog. The solution is based on groovy, “an agile dynamic language for the Java Platform” [...]

By: Boris Fritscher

Boris Fritscher — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:57:49 +0000

if you want to reuse as-is you will need all my css/js/img files. I uploaded the complete project on http://github.com/bfritscher/www-itunesu have a look.

By: Marco

Marco — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:58:38 +0000

Hi Boris, thanks a lot. Your work is very useful – I’m trying to make our small iTunesU site available also to Linux users and your script is a godsend. But…

I am puzzled – I installed groovy (1.7.3) on my machine (a mac) which has a Tomcat server running. I also installed you “index_fixed” and “proxy” as groovlets following the instructions given by http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovlets.
Everything seems to work, apart of he graphical rendering. If I use your site
http://1.latest.unil-podcast.appspot.com/index.groovy?handle=https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/unitn.it
everything works well – while if I use your script on my site
http://latemar.science.unitn.it:8080/groovy/index.groovy?handle=https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/unitn.it
the graphical rendering is wrong – as if some css was missing…
Any hint?