Doing cool stuff on the web is getting easier

Doing cool stuff like grabbing data from a site and parsing it into something cool on your site will be easy someday, and we can see the steps in the progression happening today.  This article and the links bellow tel how Yahoo! is making their cloud data engine open to all, and building a legion of developers who are publishing script spinets you can use on your site to do cool data base type stuff.

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here’s YQL Execute

Written by Jolie O’Dell / May 2, 2009 10:00 AM

“I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud”

There’s a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It’s all there for the parsing – and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it’s the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

“It adds a lot of power,” said Mike Cannon-Brooks, co-founder of Atlassian, an Australian collaboration and development software company widely recognized as one of the biggest stars in the Enterprise 2.0 world.

“YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.”

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, “The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement.”

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

“Nothing… It’s pretty awesome,” said Cannon-Brooks.

via Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here’s YQL Execute – ReadWriteWeb .

Also check out GitHub Social Coding where you can find spinets to build data tables into your site for everything from lastfm to twitter. It still requires some understanding of code to use so it is great for the more geeky types to do all sort of cool mashups and topics specific stuff with.  It is only a little time before these type of operations become full web widgets that you can embed in your site by simply filling out some settings.

~ by kenberger on May 3, 2009.

Posted in Social Media, Uncategorized, Web Development
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