Understanding Mashups
Lately, web developer buzz has been centered on Web 2.0--a term coined by Tim O'Reilly-- defines the new goals in website development as creating rich user experiences on web-based platforms. The trend is towards collaborative website development between designers and users with a focus on services, social networks, and shared content. For example, Google and Yahoo share their respective data through APIs, or application programmer interfaces. These APIs make possible a relatively new web experience through mashups or combining data from two or more applications to create a new user experience.
The mashup below uses the Yahoo API to create a traffic mapping tool. Enter the city and state for a view of traffic accidents, delays, and other incidents in your area. If no markers are present, try entering New York, New York where unfortunately, accidents seem to be ever present in the city.
For more information on this mashup, see the programmer notes below.
Traffic Web Services Mashup with Yahoo! Maps
Web Services are web applications used for exchanging the data between applications. Following is the example of a mashup between Yahoo! Traffic API and Yahoo! Maps API. Both of these web services are based on the REST architecture where you send a structured query to the Yahoo! server, and it returns an XML response or a PHP serialized object. This object contains data in a string format which is then parsed or unserialized and used in the map interface. Among the items included in this data are: type of incident, description, report date and time, and the severity of the incident.
By default this page shows the information for Austin, Texas. You may enter any address in the form above.
| Posted by: Manish Ranade Applications Programmer |
What people are saying:
By the way...i LOVE the mashup. I show all my friends that mashup all the time. I think its useful and the perfect combination of making that regular RSS information actually useable.
Buddy Quaid
Austin, Texas
