webservices

I'm a little shocked to see that we haven't talked about Yahoo Pipes around these parts. It's an awfully cool service, and one that we use around the office for various non-mission-critical functions — getting larger photos from a Flickr stream for display on the monitors in the lobby, for one thing.

For those unaware, Pipes lets you mix, translate, annotate and otherwise alchemically modify feeds of all sorts. Want to add a (possibly) relevant photo to each entry on your blog? Or only get posts from a particular author on a group blog? Or get filtered Craiglist real estate listings translated into German and sent to your mobile phone? Pipes can do all of this, and does so via a terminally-slick GUI.

But recently a friend tipped me off to Pipes' most significant capability. The folks at Yahoo! have unveiled the Holy Grail of feed-manipulation components: a JSON-powered interface to external web services. If Pipes doesn't offer some functionality you need, you can now write a web service that does and connect it to the system.

Their example code is in Java, but it didn't take much effort for me to get one working in PHP. Just install the JSON PECL Package and use code like the following: