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 4. Your Own Video Jukebox

Project Overview

What

Mashup the web APIs from Last.fm and YouTube to create a video jukebox of songs

Protocols Used

REST (XML-RPC available)

Data Formats

XML, XPSF, RSS

Tools Featured

PEAR

APIs Used

Last.fm and YouTube

Now that we’ve had some experience using web services, it’s time to fine tune their use. XML-RPC, REST, and SOAP will be frequent companions when you use web services and create mashups. You will encounter a lot of different data formats, and interesting ways in which the PHP community has dealt with these formats. This is especially true because REST has become so popular. In REST, with no formalized response format, you will encounter return formats that vary from plain text to ad-hoc XML to XML-based standards.

The rest of our projects will focus on exposing us to some new formats, and we will look at how to handle them through PHP. We will begin with a project to create our own personalized video jukebox. This mashup will pull music lists feeds from...