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)

Amazon API


The Amazon Web Services (http://www.amazon.com/aws) is a whole family of web services for a variety of Amazon products. Among the products Amazon offers is a virtual computing service, a digital storage service, and a messaging queue service (and you thought they just sold DVDs and books...). Some of their services are fee-based like their historical pricing data, while others, like their Alexa Web Service, are free or free for a certain number of requests. Not surprisingly, Amazon has a free web service for their traditional ecommerce products like books and DVDs, called their Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS).

Architecturally, the web services are available as either REST or SOAP. According to Amazon’s Chief Web Services Evangelist, Jeff Barr, 85% of their web service developers use their REST services. Later, we will look at SOAP for another mashup, but for now, we will join that 85% and use the simpler REST service.

The ECS is what we will be looking at. Before we get started...