Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects
Iain Laskey does the Monster Mash
| Product | PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects |
|---|---|
| Company | Packt Publishing |
| Web | www.packtpub.com |
| Price | £24.99 |
| We like | clear coverage, good groundwork, price |
| We don't like | index a bit lightweight |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
In the last few years the word mashup seems to have been applied to everything from dance remixes to videos and now we have web mashups. In each case, the idea is basically the same, get a bunch of good stuff from different sources and pull it together to make something new and interesting.
Web mashups are becoming increasingly common, nay fashionable and can be a great way to add some major functionality to a web site for very little effort. The process has been promoted in part by the wide number of APIs made available by various web content providers such as Yahoo or Google. This book shows you how to make use of these facilities allowing you to add some genuinely useful content to your website.
It's worth noting up front that the book's content is very focussed - it assumes you're up to speed with PHP, XML and all the various technologies used and just need to know how to tie it all up. Within 20-32 pages it's sleeves rolled up time with chunks of code to wade through that implement XML-RPC parsing so it's clearly not for beginners.
PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a fairly slim book at just over 270 pages but it does cover a lot of ground. The first couple of chapters cover the basics of putting together mashup type applications and look at working with GET,POST, PEAR and REST plus a quick look at the Amazon API.
Chapter 3 goes through the steps needed to build your own search engine (don't expect to take on Google just yet though. This covers XML Schema Data (XSD) and SOAP for messaging and includes coverage of Microsoft's Live Search services and some of Yahoo's extensive search services.
Chapter 4 moves on to a video jukebox using components from YouTube plus Last.fm. Chapter 5 is a traffic incident monitor and chapter 6 uses Google maps, Flickr, JSON and SPARQL to access London Tube photos.
Clearly, a fair number of APIs, toolkits and methodologies get examined. How does it fare? Surprisingly well. The explanations are clear but not overly wordy and refreshingly honest about some of the hurdles and issues you'll be facing. The code examples and illustrations are well chosen and are clearly 'real' code rather than something contrived for teaching purposes. We also appreciated the number of tables of calls and parameters that are provided. There are also plenty of useful URLs of resources to get tools from or for getting more detail on the APIs. We'd have liked to see a more fullsome index referencing more of the various API calls by name but that apart, there's little to complain about.
Conclusion
If you're curious about levereging the many facilities being offered by the big players out there, this book is just what you need to get you going. With so many APIs and technologies to play with, no single book can expect to cover them all in any meaningful way and so we feel the author has wisely chosen to get the basics in place and to teach via real world examples using a small set of projects. All you need to add is the inspiration on what to build from all the building blocks.
