Resource URIs

booking is a command line, but the booking Go package is also a small driver that makes Booking.com addressable as a resource URI. A host program registers it the way a program registers a database driver with database/sql, then dereferences booking:// URIs without knowing anything about how Booking.com is fetched.

The host that does this today is ant, a single binary that puts one URI namespace over a family of site tools. The examples below use ant; any program that links the package gets the same behaviour.

Mounting the driver

A host enables the driver with one blank import, exactly like import _ "github.com/lib/pq":

import _ "github.com/tamnd/booking-cli/booking"

The package's init registers a domain with the scheme booking for the host www.booking.com. The standalone booking binary does not change.

The URI scheme

A URI is booking://<type>/<id>. The id is the same reference each command takes.

URI	What it is
booking://property/gb/the-savoy	one property, keyed by <cc>/<slug>
booking://reviews/gb/the-savoy	that property's reviews
booking://destination/country/us	one destination node
booking://destinations/country/us	a destination's child nodes
booking://properties/city/us/orlando	the hotels on a destination landing page
booking://search/Orlando	a free-text destination search

ant get booking://property/gb/the-savoy      # the property record
ant cat booking://property/gb/the-savoy      # just the description
ant url booking://destination/country/us     # the live https URL
ant ls  booking://properties/city/us/orlando # the hotels on a city page

The record graph

Records connect into one graph, and every edge is a field that points at another addressable record:

• A suggestion fans out: search_ref to a search, destination to a destination node, property to a property.
• A search card points through to the full property.
• A property reaches its reviews through reviews_ref and the city it sits in through destination_ref.
• A review points back to its property.
• A destination climbs to its parent through parent_ref, descends to its children through children_ref, lists its hotels through properties_ref, and opens a search through search_ref.

The geographic tree and the property graph connect through the city node, so a crawl from any seed reaches the reachable public estate.

Walking the graph

ls lists the members of a collection, and every member is itself an addressable URI, so a host can follow the graph and write it to disk:

ant ls     booking://destinations/country/us         # the country's child nodes
ant export booking://properties/city/us/orlando --follow 1 --to ./data

Because edges between records carry their target type, ant export --follow and ant graph walk those edges across tools when a link points at another site's scheme.

Two tiers, same as the CLI

The driver reads the same two tiers the command does. destination, destinations, and properties are the reliable destination estate and read from anywhere. property, reviews, and search are the best-effort interactive client, which can hit the bot wall from a datacenter. A host sees that as the same need-auth outcome the CLI reports as exit code 4.

Why this is the same code

The driver and the binary share one definition per operation. A resolver op answers both booking property on the command line and ant get booking://property/... through a host, from the same handler and the same client. There is no second implementation to keep in step.