Speeding up your remote data access with Yahoo YQL and JSON
If you are already familiar with using JavaScript heavily for the Web, particularly when using popular libraries such as jQuery or Prototype, then you may already be aware of the benefits of using JSON instead of XML. The JSON data format is much less verbose than XML, which means that file size is smaller and data transfer is much faster. This is particularly important when a user on a mobile device may be limited in data speed due to network access and bandwidth.
If you have never seen Yahoo!'s YQL console or heard of the YQL language web service, note that it is essentially a free web service that allows developers and applications to query, filter, and combine separate data sources from across the Internet.
In this recipe, we are going to use the Yahoo! YQL console and web service to obtain data from our recipes' data feed, and transform that data into a JSON object, which we'll then bind to our TableView.
How to do it...
First...