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)

RSS


The simplest answer to, “What is RSS?”, is that it’s an XML file used to publish frequently updated information, like news items, blogs entries, or links to podcast episodes. News sites like Slashdot.org and the New York Times provide their news items in RSS format. As new news items are published, they are added to the RSS feed. Being XML-based, third-party aggregator software makes reading news items easy. With one piece of software, I can tell it to grab feeds from various sources and read the news items in one location. Web applications can also read and parse RSS files. By offering an RSS feed for my blog, another site can grab the feed and keep track of my daily life. This is one way by which a small site can provide rudimentary web services with minimal investment.

The more honest answer is that it is a group of XML standards (used to publish frequently updated information like news items or blogs) that may have little compatibility with each other. Each version release also has...