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)

XMLHttpRequest Object


The next technologies we will look at depart from the server-oriented tools we have used. You have probably heard of AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML transfer. At the least, you have probably seen it on sites like Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail. AJAX allows web browsers to interact with a server without refreshing the page. Combined with dynamic HTML, it has created a new level of interactivity between users and websites. With the near instantaneous data changes in front of a user, web applications have never been more like desktop applications.

Another benefit to AJAX is that it can severely decrease the traffic between web browser and web server. When we take a look at the amount of data being passed to Google Maps, we will see why constant refreshes would slow down the application too much.

As we discuss AJAX and XMLHttpRequest, we’ll build a very simple web application. This application will take input from the user, pass it to a server, the server will send back...