I wrote this little application to learn some Google AppEngine and practice my lately rusting python skills. I was inspired by the work of Simon Willison with his json-time and json-head. Studying (well, actually trying to study) Mandarin I found cumbersome to get to know the reading of unknown characters, so this app was made to scratch my own itch and as an excuse to play with Unicode, JSON and Ajax
While it's relative easy to find the correct meaning of a phrase using the amazing GTalk Translation Bots while chatting in Chinese, outside webpages (and definitely not in Safari) pinyin reading is out of reach.
Sure, on websites you can easily use Chinese Pera-Kun and Google Translate offers good translation APIs, but pinyin is inaccessible.
Well, until now ;)
I got the pinyin readings from the Unihan database and I basically took all the characters having an existing kMandarin field and put them on a GApp Datastore.
Emanuel Carnevale
me @ NameSurname.com