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)

Summary


In this chapter, we used the new PHP DOM extension found in PHP 5 to screen scrape information. This is a far more sophisticated and powerful way to extract information from websites than old methods that often would hard code a lot of structural information. After getting permission from the California Highway Patrol, we deconstructed the Live Incidents site to see how it works. With this knowledge, we used the PHP DOM extension to extract traffic incident data from the Live Incidents website, reformatted it, and prepared it for delivery through SMS. 411Sync.com makes creating mobile content very easy. All we had to do was create an RSS feed. Through keywords, 411Sync.com directs requests to our RSS feed and sends it back to the mobile device.