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)

YouTube Overview


YouTube almost needs no introduction these days. The site is as ubiquitous as many of the previous sites we discussed—Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Links to its videos have been passed around email accounts. In case you have lead a very sheltered existence, we will take a brief look at what YouTube does, some features, and its Web API.

In a nutshell, YouTube is a site that allows users to share homemade videos with the public via the Internet. Users upload any video they wish (with much respect to copyright laws) and other users may view and comment on them. The latter has led YouTube to become a strong social networking site in addition to just sharing videos.

Some of the available features of YouTube include:

  • Video Tagging

    YouTube relies on its user community to describe the videos in its repository. This is done by allowing users to associate descriptive words and short phrases with a particular video. This process is known as tagging. For example, if I am watching a clip...