Yesterday I wrote a blog post on YDN about opening the web covering curl, pipes and YQL and today I did a more detailed deep-dive on Ajaxian about how YQL can help you to convert the web to JSON.

Suffice to say, I like YQL a lot – it is the command line interface to the web (and a text version of Yahoo Pipes). Go and play with it yourself:

As explained in the Ajaxian article, all the non-authentication web services can be accessed through a public REST API. Simply add your YQL statement to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q= and add a format=json parameter and a callback parameter with the name of your callback function and you are set.

This would for example to allow you to search for rabbit images on the web and display them quick and dirty with a few lines of JavaScript:

YQL allows you to access any freely available data service and even scrape HTML, how cool is that?

One of my favourite “old school” Yahoo APIs is the term extractor which is a service that extracts relevant keywords from a text you give it.

Yahoo BOSS is now supporting this feature for indexed web sites. While you’d normally just get a list of sites with for example:

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&appid={appid}

You can get the keywords for each of the pages returned by adding the (so far undocumented) view=keyterms parameter:

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&view=keyterms&appid={appid}

This can be pretty useful to get a list of keywords related to a certain term.

In order to do this, I’ve written a small API in PHP and JavaScript that gets you the related terms from the first ten search results and returns them as an array.

The PHP API wrapper

The PHP version takes three parameters: the mandatory term to search for, an optional callback method name to wrap around the JSON return value and an optional format parameter that can be set to HTML to return an HTML list instead of a JSON object.

• Get keywords for “donkey” as HTML: bossterms.php?term=donkey&format=html
• Get keywords for “kitten” as JSON: bossterms.php?term=kitten
• Get keywords for “puppies” as JSON and call “bark”: bossterms.php?term=puppies&callback=bark

The JavaScript API wrapper

The JavaScript wrapper uses dynamically generated script nodes to retrieve the data and can be used by simply calling a BOSSTERMS.get() method with a search term and the name of a callback method. The return object has a term property, the keywords as an array and a string that is an HTML list of the terms.

Get the lot

You can download the whole BOSS keyword API here. As always, it is BSD licensed, so go nuts using it :)

Having had a lot of hackers at the Open Hack Day Brazil get confused on how to use the JavaScript output of Yahoo’s Open Search platform BOSS I’ve spent a short while to write a wrapper library for it. You can now easily search the web, images and news of Yahoo in one go with a few lines of code:

The wrapper does all the work for you: creating the different script nodes calling the BOSS API with the right parameters and either returning a JSON object with all the mandatory search data (links in a certain format) or returning a bunch of HTML lists that can be printed out as innerHTML anywhere you like.

Check out the yboss homepage and download the script for yourself. The hackers at the Hack Day loved it and the winning hack in the BOSS category was based on it. Also check out the presentation I’ve given on BOSS at the hack day to learn all about the system itself:

[slideshare id=733718&doc=javascript-and-boss-open-hack-day-brazil-2907&w=425]

Over at the Yahoo Developer Blog, I just posted a quick tutorial how you can use the Yahoo Music API to show videos of your favourite band in a few dozen lines of JavaScript.

This is a bit of a rough’n’ready way of doing it and I’ll get some more sophisticated examples out there once I gave some feedback to the Music API team :)

As it is Friday and I am jetlagged I declare “pointless API Friday” and give you Scrabblr.

Scrabblr allows you to send a word to it and it returns the scrabble value or an error in case the word has too many instances of a character than there are tiles available. Output formats are either a simple string (no format defined), XML or JSON. For JSON you also can have a callback parameter to use the API in script nodes.

Examples:

• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=xml
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=json
• http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/scrabblr/?word=kitten&format=json&callback=foo