Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By : Shu-Wai Chow
Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By: Shu-Wai Chow

Overview of this book

A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources into an integrated experience. This book is your entryway to the world of mashups and Web 2.0. You will create PHP projects that grab data from one place on the Web, mix it up with relevant information from another place on the Web and present it in a single application. This book is made up of five real-world PHP projects. Each project begins with an overview of the technologies and protocols needed for the project, and then dives straight into the tools used and details of creating the project: Look up products on Amazon.Com from their code in the Internet UPC database A fully customized search engine with MSN Search and Yahoo! A personal video jukebox with YouTube and Last.FM Deliver real-time traffic incident data via SMS and the California Highway Patrol! Display pictures sourced from Flickr in Google maps All the mashup applications used in the book are built upon free tools and are thoroughly explained. You will find all the source code used to build the mashups used in this book in the code download section for this book.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Internet UPC Database API


The Internet UPC Database is the first part of our mashup. This site, located at http://www.upcdatabase.com, is an interesting project. This site is a library of Universal Product Codes. Users can enter UPC numbers to see what the product is, and they can contribute to the site by adding UPC numbers and product descriptions. There are commercial vendors that sell this information to people. However, being an open, collaborative project, the Internet UPC Database gives this information away for free. Other sites have arisen to compete with the Database, but I personally like this site because it’s one of, if not the, largest and oldest sites of its kind, the content is explicitly issued under a Creative Commons License (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5), and most importantly, the site offers a XML-RPC service to interact with its database.

The XML-RPC service is free and open. There is no need to get a developer’s key or authenticate against. The API’s...