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)

Chapter 2. Buy it on Amazon

Project Overview

What

Build an application that takes UPC symbols and looks them up on Amazon.com.

Protocols Used

XML-RPC, REST

Data Formats

XML-RPC, XML

Tools Featured

PHP’s XML-RPC Functions and SAX Functions

APIs Used

Internet UPC Database, Amazon Web Services

We are going to start off with a relatively simple project. Our project will accept a Universal Product Code number from a user, look up the product information associated with the UPC number from the Internet UPC Database, and allow the user to buy the product from our site using Amazon.com. In other words, we are going to create an online store based on UPC numbers. By using Amazon.com’s inventory, users can buy from Amazon.com, but they’ll be able to do everything from our site alone. While such a site may not make us the next ecommerce king, it will introduce us to the two most basic web services—XML-RPC and REST. Each protocol will require us to structure our request in a certain way.

XML-RPC will return an...