Ahh… Covid-19. From thinking it was just another little outbreak in Asia to months long lockdowns and seeing friends and family succumb to this nasty little virus, it’s been a surreal year-and-a-half. Earlier this year we finally got some hope with the rollout of vaccines, and I personally was very eager to get vaccinated and hopefully leave my anxiety to leave the house behind me. I currently reside in Brussels, Belgium, and unlike in the US, the vaccine rollout was, at least initially, painfully slow. The Brussels government did however set up a nice little web application where they would keep everyone up to date with the current age group that was eligible to get vaccinated. The only caveat was that there was no way to keep informed of any changes to the age group other than refreshing the website. Which I did several times a day for a day or two. But, I wouldn’t work in tech if it didn’t seem a bit silly to perform a manual repetitive task right? :D
I saw a while ago a nice little demo of one of my colleagues at Red Hat who used Red Hat Fuse (based on Apache Camel) to send a message to Telegram, and this seemed like a pretty good way to go since I use Telegram on a daily basis anyway. The advantage of using an Enterprise Integration Pattern based system is that it makes the solution quite flexible, so if at some point I want to send the message to another endpoint then all I need to change is the “to” parameter of my Camel route and I’m good to go. Likewise, if I want to adapt this code to scrape bits of data from another website, then that’s a very easy change as well.
Anyway, take a look at the video and let me know what you think!
The source code can be found in my Github: https://github.com/kdubois/datascraper. Feel free to scrutinize and send pull requests with improvements!