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)

Last.fm Overview


Last.fm (http://www.last.fm) describes itself as a social music networking site. It is an interesting way to find new music based on user contributions. Users register for free at the site. You then download a small client program to run on your machine. This program monitors what music you are playing through software media players such as iTunes and WinAmp. You can also tag the songs through the program. The program uploads the song information, including tags, back to the Last.fm server. Based on the artist, song, genre, and what other people have tagged songs, Last.fm builds a music profile for you. It uses this profile to build a custom streaming radio station for you that you can also listen to through the client program, and recommends other artists and songs that are similar to the music that you like.

Note

Vigilant users may, understandably, bristle at installing a desktop program that sends their music listening habits off to a server somewhere. However, Last.fm...