The YQL & Yahoo! Apis presentation done in RHOK Bangalore

1. YQL & YAHOO! APIS
Jai Santhosh
Frontend Engineer, Hacker
Yahoo!

2. What We’re Going to Cover
• YQL Overview
• Making Queries and the Console Sandbox
• Demo
• Open Data Tables and Execute (Server-Side
JavaScript)
• Final Lessons

3. Data manipulation
Hacks = +
Data visualization

4. The web is a large pile of data!

5. ProgrammableWeb.com – 4480 Apis

6. Yahoo! has also
opened up its data

7. http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html

8. Trouble with Data
• Need to find data API
• Get Access – Signup for key
• Find data endpoint
• Read docs to learn what parameters you
have
• Get data in obscure format
• Use data after converting and filtering
• More APIs you use, more is your
annoyance

9. To make data access easy on
the web,
Yahoo! created YQL

10. =
YQL turns web services and
data on the web into
databases.

11. select {what} from {where}
where {conditions}

12. You can select, filter, sort
and limit data and you can
even insert, update and
delete from it.

13. YQL: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console

14. Finding Videos about Bangalore
• SELECT * FROM youtube.search where
query='bangalore'

15. Selecting Photos of RHOK
• SELECT * FROM flickr.photos.search where
text="rhok"

16. Inserting data
INSERT INTO bitly.shorten (login, apiKey, longUrl)
VALUES ('ME', 'API_KEY', 'http://yahoo.com')

17. updating data
UPDATE social.profile.status
SET status="Using YQL UPDATE”
WHERE guid="NJFIDHVPVVISDX7UKED2WHU"

18. Accessing Private Data
• http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql
Uses OAuth 1.0 for authorization
OAuth is complicated – use one of our SDKs at
https://github.com/yahoo

19. Retrieving my profile
• SELECT * FROM social.contacts WHERE
guid=me

20. Using the YQL Console
makes it very easy to
use it.

23. url structure
• http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql?[params]
• http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?[para
ms]
Params
q= [ YQL QUERY ]
format = [ XML / JSON ]
diagnostics = [ true / false ]
debug = [ true / false ]
callback = [ function name ]

24. Let’s See It

25. Query Samples
• SELECT * FROM twitter.search where q='hackathon’ limit 5
• select * from answers.search where query="cars" and type="resolved"
• select * from google.translate where q="this is a test" and target="hi";
• select * from google.translate where q in (select text from twitter.search
where q="hackday") and target='hi';
• select * from search.termextract where context in (select description from
rss where url='http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories')

26. Query Samples
• select * from yahoo.finance.quotes where symbol in
("YHOO","AAPL","GOOG","MSFT")
• insert into yahoo.shortener (url, keysize) values
('http://www.javarants.com', 5)
• select * from craigslist.search where location="bangalore" and
type="apa" and query="indiranagar”
• select * from html where url="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo"
and xpath='//div[@id="yfi_headlines"]/div[2]/ul/li/a’

27. Making Requests: Flickr URLs
<photo farm="3"
id="5708163920"
isfamily="0"
isfriend="0"
ispublic="1"
owner="31832337@N04"
secret="0075137487"
server="2496"
title="San Francisco"/>

28. Making Requests: Flickr URLs
Photo URL
http://farm{$farm}.static.flickr.com/{$server}/{$id
}_{$secret}.jpg
Photo Page URL
http://www.flickr.com/photos/{$owner}/{$id}
Photo Owner Profile URL
http://www.flickr.com/photos/{$owner}

29. YQL is open – you can get your
data tables in our system

30. Craigslist data table
<table>
<meta>
<author>Yahoo! Inc.</author>
<documentationURL>http://craigslist.org/</documentationURL>
<sampleQuery>
select * from {table} where location="sfbay" and type="sss" and query=“bike”
</sampleQuery>
</meta>
<bindings>
…
</bindings>
</table>

31. Craigslist data table
<table>
<meta> … </meta>
<bindings>
<select itemPath="" produces="XML">
<urls>
<url>http://{location}.craigslist.org/search/{type}?format=rss</url>
</urls>
<inputs>
<key id="location" type="xs:string" paramType="path" required="true"/>
<key id="type" type="xs:string" paramType="path" required="true"/>
<key id="query" type="xs:string" paramType="query" required="true"/>
</inputs>
</select>
</bindings>
</table>

32. Upload XML to our Github
http://github.com/yql/yql-tables

33. Or to your own Site
• The USE clause
USE 'http://www.mysite.com/my_table.xml'
AS mytable;
SELECT * FROM mytable
WHERE user='john_doe'

34. You can even write server side
javascript to build a webservice

35. Final Lessons
• YQL is a skeleton key for all Yahoo! APIs
• Open data tables allow you to create new data feeds
out of one or many different raw sources
• There are 1200+ Tables in YQL covering all major APIs
on the web
• Use SDKs when accessing private data that requires
OAuth

36. Final Lessons: Links
• All Yahoo! APIs and Services
• http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
• YQL Documentation
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yql
• YQL Console
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console
• YQL Github Account (Contribute Tables)
• http://github.com/yql/yql-tables

37. http://isithackday.com/hackday-toolbox/

38. Questions?
http://www.slideshare.net/jaisa
nth
Jai Santhosh
Twitter: @jaisanth
Github: http://github.com/jaisanth

39. THANK YOU!