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)

Preliminary Planning


Note that it would not have been wise to pre-plan mashups, but this application will be much more complex, and will definitely require some forethought. Previously, our APIs have worked in the background delivering data. We use PHP to retrieve data from an API, receive it in whatever format it gives us, format the response into either HTML output to the user, or another format to retrieve data from another API. PHP gives us a lot of flexibility in the way our application is designed.

This time, one API, Google Maps, is a JavaScript API. Another, Flickr Services, is still server based. The two cannot talk directly to each other, and we are going to have to play within the rules set by each one. More than ever, we are going to have to take a close look at everything before we attempt to write a single line of code.

At this point, this is what we know:

  1. 1.

    We need to find a data source for the Tube stations. We need to find the names of the stations in each line, and some piece...