Neil Wilkinson, Technical Director of Yahoo!7 and Yahoo!Xtra, gave a presentation about Yahoo!'s open strategy and focus on YQL. He discussed how Yahoo! embraces open standards and contributes to open source projects. Wilkinson demonstrated how YQL can be used to query data from various Yahoo! APIs, mash it together, and display the results programmatically through simple examples in PHP, Javascript, and the YQL console. YQL provides a simple way to access data from many sources and integrate it for easy use in applications.

1. Yahoo! Open Strategy – focus on YQL Neil Wilkinson (Wilf) Technical Director, Yahoo!7 and Yahoo!Xtra 2nd July 2009 © 2007 Yahoo!7 Pty Limited

3. You can call me Neil Wilkinson if you have to

4. Originally a POM, I’ve been living in Sydney for 8 years

5. Worked at Yahoo! in Australia for 6 years

6. Currently the Technical Director of Yahoo!7 and Yahoo!Xtramanaging “Technical Services”

8. Here to share the joys of some of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy

9. Browser-independent front-end development

10. YQL – The Yahoo! Query Language – focus of today’s talk

11. Why is Yahoo! opening its technology?

12. Yahoo! only has thousands of developers

14. Yahoo! is powered by Open Source technologies:

15. Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Bugzilla,Hadoop…

16. Yahoo! embraces open standards:

17. OpenID, OpenSocial, Microformats, OAuth

18. Yahoo! gives back to open source

19. YUI, github, YSlow

21. Design and develop for the user, not for the browser

22. Reset the browser CSS styles so all browsers have similar layout behaviour

23. Change the fonts so that they look the same cross-browser using percentage sizes (no more excuses for hard-coding font sizes!).

24. Use CSS grids – its just too hard to do it any other way: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/builder/

27. Most used photo API worldwide

29. So what technology hasn’t Yahoo! opened?

31. select * from internets

32. Is a command-line language to get data from APIs

33. Is a RESTful interface, returning XML or JSON

34. Can be used with server-side HTTP requests or json function callbacks (for javascript client-side HTTP requests).

36. http://nz.rss.news.yahoo.com/top_stories.xml

37. And search the descriptions for a keyword

40. We use an IN clause to use the result of 1 API into the input of another API

41. Best demonstrated with an example:select content from search.termextract where context in ( select description from rss where url="http://nz.rss.news.yahoo.com/top_stories.xml" limit 1 )

43. What if we used that data to get the other related news going on in the worldselect * from search.news wherequery in ( select content from search.termextract where context in ( select description from rss where url="http://nz.rss.news.yahoo.com/top_stories.xml" limit 1 ) )

45. Let’s get web search results too:select * from search.web where query in ( select content from search.termextract where context in ( select description from rss where url="http://nz.rss.news.yahoo.com/top_stories.xml" limit 1 ) )

47. Let’s get flickr results too:select * from flickr.photos.search where text in ( select content from search.termextract where context in ( select description from rss where url="http://nz.rss.news.yahoo.com/top_stories.xml" limit 1 ) )

49. Using CURL to make a server-side web request<?php $ch = curl_init(“http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select…&format=json”); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $jsonContent = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $content = json_decode($jsonContent); ?>

51. Not exactly rocket science:<?php echo(‘<ul>’); foreach ($content[‘results’] as $result) { $url = $result[‘clickurl’]; $title = $result[‘title’]; echo(“<li><a href=$url>$title</a></li>”); } echo(‘</ul>’); ?>

52. YQL – so how do we use this data? function SimpleSearch(searchResultsDivId) { this.searchResultsOL = document.getElementById(searchResultsDivId); this.display = function(o) { varinnerHTML = ''; varresults = o.query.results.result; for (i in results) { varresult = results[i]; innerHTML = innerHTML + '<li><a href="' + result.clickurl + '">' + result.title + '</a><br />’ + result.abstract + '</li>'; } this.searchResultsOL.innerHTML = innerHTML; } }

55. News, Web and Flickr results

56. From 3 YQL queries

57. Using JSON callbacks

58. All HTTP requests done by the browser

59. No server-side processing

61. YQL – Table List

63. This gets all main navigation items from the herald:select * from html where url='http://www.nzherald.co.nz' and xpath='//h2/a'

66. Your YQL query is cached for you by Yahoo! infrastructure

67. However, especially if your servers are in New Zealand, caching local to your server is important for scale and performance

68. Caching is also important to avoid hitting Yahoo!’s limit of 100,000 per application ID per day

70. Mash up a huge variety of data including APIs, contributed open tables, your own tables and any publically available feed or webpage

71. Use Yahoo! data, don’t use Yahoo! data – up to you.