A blog about Raymond Yee's Book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services
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I'm sad about the announcement that Google is shutting down its Mashup Editor -- one reason being that I had spent a fair amount of effort writing about it in Chapter 11 of my book. Oh well. The Google App Engine is touted as a suitable and more powerful alternative to the Mashup Editor -- but I have to agree with that the comment that the simplicity of the Mashup Editor was a virtue.
In Chapter 8 of my mashup book, I wrote
I was hoping that in the course of writing my book, I would have had an opportunity to do my in-depth study of various JavaScript libraries (of which there are many, judging from the table in the Wikipedia entry Comparison of JavaScript frameworks). I raised the question of how to choose a JavaScript library during a panel on OpenAjax as a way of studying the implications of such initiatives as OpenAjax -- that is, does OpenAjax make it easier to figure out what JavaScript library to choose -- or does it allow one to pick and choose the best parts from a whole range of libraries? These are questions I plan to raise in my spring 2009 Mixing and Remixing Information course.
At any rate, I recently had a chance to take a closer look at AJAX Libraries API - Google Code, which is "a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries", which at present, include:
From a pedagogical point of view, the Google AJAX Libraries API, by providing a single common library call (google.load) simplifies getting set up with each of the libraries, which otherwise, would require a different setup. Of course, there are reasons that you might not want to depend on Google to host JavaScript libraries you use -- but not having to take care of hosting these files yourself helps beginners jump right in.
I'm pleased to see that The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) recently became part of the Google API. I use that library in my course and in my book. The post on Google AJAX Search API Blog announcing this inclusion gave a short code example on how to use YUI with the Google AJAX Libraries API -- it did not actually show any visible in the user interface. Here I show to elaborate the example slightly to actually show something visible in the UI.
To do so, you should take look at the YUI docs for the calendar widget and understand a bit about what the YUILoader (Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Loader Utility does. One thing to note is that google.load('yui', '2.6.0'); creates an instance of a global YAHOO object. Secondly, YUILoader takes care of loading the pieces of YUI required to use the widget that you want to use -- see Getting Started for more details. You will also want to load in the default CSS to get started (through the line <body class="yui-skin-sam">). The modified code I came up with is:
<head>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
google.load('yui', '2.6.0');
function init() {
var loader = new YAHOO.util.YUILoader({
require: ["button", "calendar"],
base: "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/",
onSuccess: function() {
// start playing with buttons and calendars!
var cal = new YAHOO.widget.Calendar("calContainer");
cal.render();
}
});
loader.insert();
}
google.setOnLoadCallback(init);
</script>
</head>
<body class="yui-skin-sam">
<div id="calContainer"></div>
</body>
which you can run at http://labs.mashupguide.net/doc/2008/11/google.ajaxlib.yui.eg.html
With pointers such as Greg Sadetsky's tidbits on how Google Map's Street View works in the browser (e.g., URLs of specific shots, a pointer to a Flare, an Actionscript decompiler), how long will we have to wait until we get mashups that give us a video tour of Berkeley using photos from Street View?
KML has moved beyond its use in Google Earth alone. For instance, you can display KML files and export search results and one of your "my maps" from Google Maps in KML. Other applications are beginning to support KML: For instance, you can get KML coming out of Yahoo! Pipes. There is support for KML in Feed Validator KML is being shepherded through a standards process: Paul Ramsey: KML @ OGC. Google is advising people to use KML so that its geo--search can index KML -- in KML 2.2, there is an attribution element. Google apparently will also index GeoRSS.
I don't think that there is an official API for Google Reader although Niall Kennedy documened an unofficial Google Reader API a while back.
It's very difficult to keep up with the world of public APIs and mashups -- even for someone like me who is writing a book on the topic and teaching a course on the subject! Now that I have a bit more time to work on the topic, I turn now to being more assiduous in my reading of online news sources. My first priority is a consistent read of John Musser's ProgrammableWeb. I already make steady use of its database of APIs and often point others to the Mashup Dashboard when people ask me for concrete examples of mashups. Now I want to keep up with his blog. Today (April 20)'s post concerns Google AJAX Feed API, which is described thus by the Google documentation:
Hmmm...I get to a detailed look at Chapter 4 next week on RSS and other feeds. I've written about Yahoo Pipes for remixing RSS. This Google AJAX widget demands a close look too! (Thanks, John, for alerting me to this new development! I also need to subscribe to Google AJAX Search API Blog in my news reader.)
"Machine tags" (see Flickr: Discussing Machine tags in Flickr API) have been introduced into Flickr as generalization of things like geotagging. Machine tags are also known by many as "triple tags". These are tags with a specific syntax aimed primarily for "machine consumption" (that is, by programs) and not directly for display to the typical end-user. You can use machine values to store extra data elements for a given photo. I think that it's fair to say that most important example of such data has so far been the latitude and longitude associated with a photo. So important that Flickr ultimately introduced specialized functionality to handle this data, to take that data out of the realm of having people just shoehorning that info into tags.
I'd really like to know what uptake there has been on machine tags. I was hoping to be able to do searches for namespaces in use -- but as I document below, I don't know how to formulate a query to do so.
Some kinks have been fixed in the Flickr machine tags:
Some outstanding issues remain:
What are the equivalent of machine tags in other systems? What to look at:
Fodder for Chapter 17 on office suites when I get to writing it in detail: