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)

Mashing Up


If you haven’t already, you should, at the very least, create a YouTube account and sign up for a developer key. You should also create a Last.fm account, install the client software, and start listening to some music on your computer. This will personalize the video jukebox to your music tastes. All examples here will assume that you are using your own YouTube key. I will use my own Last.fm account for the examples. As the feeds are open and free, you can use the same feeds if you choose not to create a Last.fm account.

Mashup Architecture

There are obviously many ways in which we can set up our application. However, we’re going to keep functionality fairly simple.

The interface will be a framed web page. The top pane is the navigation pane. It will be for the song selection. The bottom section is the content pane and will display and play the video.

In the navigation pane, we will create a select menu with all of our songs. The value, and label, for each option will be the artist...