Remember the ‘good’ old days when doing a simple RSS mashup was tedious, to say the least? For one, most front-end developers were unable to accomplish this since it required some fairly advanced knowledge of server-side languages like PHP or ASP.NET. However, Yahoo! Pipes soon came onto the scene and really changed the way data could be shown and mashed up – the best part being that basically anyone, whether front-end or back-end developer, could do.
There have been a lot of really cool and creative things done via Yahoo! Pipes, but recently Yahoo! has taken things a step further with the release of the Yahoo! Query Language (YQL).
The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. With YQL, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint.
YQL supports a featured called the Open Data Tables. I’ve yet to dabble in this as everything I’ve needed up to this point has been included with the community tables. That being said, the true power of this feature is that a person can define a table of data for anything on the Web, or as Yahoo! puts it:
select * from internet
More information is available on this subject at the Community Open Data Tables for YQL Web site.
There are a few ways to use YQL; and it’s recommended you get comfortable with it by using the console for it. By default there are a list of approximately 80 tables of varying data sources that you can access, however it is recommended that you click the Show Community Tables link in the right-hand sidebar. This expands the list considerable and includes a lot of popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The other option is to run YQL as a Web service from your PHP-enabled Web server, by downloading the Yahoo! Social SDK. The installation instructions are straight-forward and the INSTALL.txt file will give you enough instructions to get yourself up and running.
The potential for this product is pretty much limitless. I’ve got a few ideas rattling around my head – the first being to create a complete social mashup of all our team members here at iStudio to enhance link sharing. We all have great ideas and Web sites but it’s hard to share them. A tool like this will make sharing (and viewing) them a breeze.
