YQL & PHP

YQL -- that's the Yahoo! Query Language, and not Lethbridge airport -- has been around for over a year and many people have built funky webapps with it. It's supposed to be the one API to handle all of the web's data, and its SQL like syntax means that you're thinking more about the kind of data you can get at rather than the code you need to battle to get at that data. From scraping data out of a web page using XPath, to pulling structured data from an RSS feed, to mashing up multiple sources, to creating your own sources, YQL lets you do it all, and can be a lot of fun to play with. In this talk, I'll go over some of the cool things I like about YQL and in the process, perhaps help you build apps rapidly and have some fun doing it.