Slides from a talk I gave at Edinburgh Techmeetup on a brief introduction to YQL.

1. The Web is your API with YQL

2. Working with data from the web?
Hate jumping through API hoops?

3. What we do...
1. Find a good API
2. Sign up for developer key
3. Confirm sign up
4. Find required method
5. Read docs
6. Authenticate?
7. Read docs again
8. Receive a chunk of data
9. Filter data to make it useful

4. What we want...
1. Find good data
2. Request and filter data
3. Do something with the data

5. That's where YQL comes in...
(http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/)

6. SELECT {something}
FROM {somewhere}
WHERE {conditions}
The web becomes your database
Single URI/end-point
Select, Insert, Update and Delete
Filter, Sort and Limit

7. YQL is an open web service
No other Yahoo tools needed
Return data as XML, JSON, JSON-P

8. Easy to use YQL console
Helps build queries like
https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/
yql?q={uri_encoded_query}&
format={xml|json}&
diagnostics={true|false}&
callback={function}

9. Call service in PHP using cURL
$yql = 'SELECT * '
. 'FROM ukgeocode '
. 'WHERE postcode = "EH5 2GJ"';
$service = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?';
$url = $service . '&q=' . url_encode($yql);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$out = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
print_r($out);

10. Not limited to data provided by Yahoo
Community contributed data tables
(http://datatables.org/)
Contribute with definition file
You can use server-side javascript

11. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<table xmlns="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd">
<meta>
<sampleQuery>Sample query here</sampleQuery>
<author>A. Nother</author>
<documentationURL>Tell me more here.</documentationURL>
<description>Brief description here.</description>
</meta>
<bindings>
<select itemPath="response.coord" produces="XML">
<urls>
<url>
http://ukgeocode.maxmanders.co.uk/postcode/{postcode}
</url>
</urls>
<inputs>
<key id='postcode' type='xs:string'
paramType='path' required="true" />
</inputs>
</select>
</bindings>
</table>

12. http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
http://github.com/yql/yql-tables/
http://datatables.org/

13. K THX BYE
I CAN HAZ QUESTIONS?
http://maxmanders.co.uk/
http://twitter.com/maxmanders/