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)

Google Maps API


The Google Maps API allows third party developers to use the features of Google Maps on their own sites. Anything you can do as a user of Google Maps can be done using the Google Maps API. The Google Maps documentation home page is located at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/. The documentation is quite extensive. We will take a look at how the API basically works, and concentrate on the features we will use in our mashup. Just knowing how the API is organized is the key step in searching for information and using the Google Maps API in future projects.

The Google Maps API requires an API key. You can register for it for free at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html. This key is used when including the Google Maps API in your page. Before you do anything with Google Maps, you will need to get this API key and put this source tag and in top of your page’s head tag.

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2&amp;key=Your
Google API...