Web Developer's Cookbook

CHAPTER 10

APIs, RSS, and XML

One of the most interesting recent developments on the Web is the trend of providing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to web sites, with which you can integrate content from other sites into your own. Generally such APIs accept standard POST or GET requests as might be sent from an HTML form or hyperlink, and then return data in the form of XML (Extensible Markup Language), JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), or other easy-to-process formats.

For example, both Google and Yahoo! provide a range of APIs for many of their web properties, such as Google Book Search and Charts, or Yahoo! Search, Answers, and Stocks, ...