Review: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects from Packt Publishing is all about interacting with popular APIs such as Flickr and Amazon with PHP and Ajax. This book is very example-focused, so besides giving the foundation for understanding alphabet soup like REST, SOAP, XML and JSON, you also get to follow some complete projects that use these acronyms for some healthy learning-by-doing. Here’s a basic rundown of the things you will learn:

• XML-RPC: how to make requests with PHP and parse responses; how to write your own parser and how to use the fancy one provided in PEAR.
• REST: how to make requests with PHP and parse responses; how to write your own parser and how to use the SAX parser class.
• SOAP: with a rundown on WSDL and XSD, how to make requests, parse responses, and use PHP’s SoapClient.
• XML formats such as XSPF, RSS, RDF
• JSON
• SPARQL
• Enough Ajax to do the examples, though this book is not an instruction on Ajax by any means
• PEAR: installing and using classes
• Screen Scraping: Yes, gasp, screen scraping with DOM functions.
• A simple proxy for cross-site XMLHttpRequests, which is useful since you can’t make these requests to other sites without a proxy

And here are the mashup examples:

• A lookup service that allows a user to enter a UPC and get the product from Amazon, even with shopping cart support (XML-RPC, REST)
• A search service that gets results from both MSN and Yahoo! (ah, the memories of dogpile, which actually still exists) (XML, REST, SOAP)
• A video jukebox that uses feeds from Last.fm and finds the videos for those songs on YouTube (XML, REST, XSPF, RSS)
• A notification service that takes highway incident notifications from the California Highway Patrol website and sends them to cellphones via SMS using 411Sync.com (RSS, Screen Scraping with DOM functions)
• A photo service that shows London Tube photos from Flickr by station on Google Maps (XML, REST, RDF, JSON, SPARQL, Ajax)

Needless to say, this is a “everything you need to know about APIs and mashups” kind of book. I learned about XML/RDF/REST in college with Java as the language of choice, and I’ve been able to use some APIs in the past with the help of PHP client classes (that’s why you see a Flickr photo on my homepage). This book, however, covers a lot of different technologies in less than 300 pages, and it gives you what you need to know to not be dependent on client classes provided by the myriad of services out there, which is extremely helpful since you can’t always expect a drop-in client class to be available.

And even if you think that as a web developer you have no plans of ever building a web application or mashup service, there’s still the chance that your employer or some client will someday need one of these services on a project. In that sense, the things taught in this book are pretty much required knowledge for any web developer these days, because as much as web 2.0 might be a fad, all the alphabet soup technologies involved are not. We’ll be using them for many, many years to come.

In short, I recommend this book. Even if you know this stuff pretty well, this book still offers a lot to learn.