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)

Microsoft Live Search Web Service


The Microsoft Live Search Web Service is an easy to use SOAP service. These are a few key highlights:

  • MSN Search Web Service only has one operation, which is named Search. A cached version of the page is available, as part of the Search result.

  • MSN Search has a search request limit of 20,000 requests per day.

  • There are 250 maximum results returned with each search.

The home page for MSN Search Web Service is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/live/msnsearch/default.aspx. Extensive documentation, sample code (in.NET), and developer forums are available. You will also need a license key, which they call an AppID, for Live Search. You can get that at http://search.msn.com/developer.

Using Search

Microsoft Live Search Web Service organizes all of its related operations and parameters into objects. This is a bit of a challenge for us because the parameters argument for SoapClient’s SOAP calls must be an array. SoapClient then serializes it into a format the service likes...