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April 11th, 2008

Google Chart API’s New Schematic Maps

Graphic, schematic maps can very useful in a wide range of charting scenarios and thanks to a recent upgrade, now you can use the Google Chart API to create them. As we reported earlier, Google’s Chart API is one of the simplest of all Google APIs. By passing parameters in the URL (i.e., HTTP GET), you can get images for various types of charts — bar charts, pie charts, line charts, etc — that you can embed on any web page. Plenty of mashups are already using the API including the 15+ mashups listed here.

The recent update adds this fun and useful capability as you can see in the docs. You can embed static maps that you can color by country or by US state. Here are a few simple examples of such maps, starting with a world map:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=t&chs=440×220&chd=s:_&chtm=world

World Map 1

You’ll note that the parameters in the URL control the map, three of which are mandatory for any Google chart:

type (cht): t represents the map type
size (chs): The size used in the example (440 by 220 pixels) is the maximum available for all maps.
data for the map (chd): Here s:_ is the simple encoding for “missing” (or no) value.
and a fourth parameter particular to maps (chtm) indicates a geographic area (e.g., world, asia, middle_east).

Compare the world map to the “Hello World” of Google Charts to see how the same API can be used to simple pie chart (click on the pie chart to see the full url/call):

Going back to the world map, see how changing the chtm parameter in the URL displays a map of Europe and using three additional parameters (chco, chld, and chd) highlight Hungary in green, while keeping other European countries an off-white:

Are people already using the Google Chart API to make maps? Take a look at the article Making maps with Google Chart API (listed in the ProgrammableWeb mashup database), which discusses the issues involved with generating the following fuller example of a world map:

Jeffrey Barke wrote a short tutorial for creating maps with the Google Chart API.

As others have noted, the maps one can create in this way are more demonstrations of what’s possible than fully developed functionality — so it’ll be interesting to see whether/how Google refines this feature of the Google Chart API.

For more on the Google Chart API at ProgrammableWeb check-out Google Chart Mashups: Love and Stats.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Google, HowTo, Visualization at 1:02 AM | 3 Comments »

May 15th, 2007

7 Java Resources for Mashups

If you want to write mashups in Java these libraries might save you a lot of time. Just as with the 12 Ruby Resources we looked at last week, these resources can greatly simplify access to major APIs. Some are officially supported by the API providers themselves and others are independent, open source efforts.

Facebook Java Client: Wraps the increasingly popular Facebook API. This library was recently updated in March.
flickrj: A Java wrapper for the Flickr API.

Read the rest of “7 Java Resources for Mashups” »

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Posted by John Musser as HowTo, Java, PopularAllTime at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

May 7th, 2007

12 Ruby Mashup Resources

ruby Want to build a mashup using Ruby? To help you get started we’ve rounded-up a dozen Ruby libraries for open web APIs that can help you get a head start. Most of these are Ruby wrappers — often as gems — that simplify coding for specific APIs and sometimes across APIs.

YouTube API Wrapper: A Ruby object-oriented interface to the YouTube REST API.
rflickr: rflickr is a Ruby implementation of the Flickr API. It includes a faithful reproduction of the published API as well as method encapsulation to provide more useful object mappings. rflickr features result caching to improve performance.

Read the rest of “12 Ruby Mashup Resources” »

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Posted by John Musser as HowTo, PopularAllTime, Ruby at 12:07 AM | 14 Comments »

February 1st, 2007

Mashup Coding Links: Google, Security, REST

As part of a new ongoing ProgrammableWeb feature, we’ll start providing a regular stream of links on a variety of API, mashup, tool and industry topics. Rather than group them just as ‘links’, these will be posted in a unified theme. So today’s are coding-centric. (Keep in mind, there are now over 60 how-to mashup and API articles indexed on our /howto page).
Read the rest of “Mashup Coding Links: Google, Security, REST” »

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Posted by John Musser as HowTo at 12:06 AM | No Comments »

September 26th, 2006

Books for Amazon Mashups

Continuing the series on books for mashup developers — last week Flickr Mashup Books — here is a quick summary of books that can help you build mashups with the various Amazon APIs.

Note that the Amazon APIs are quite popular with 94 Amazon e-commerce API mashups listed at ProgrammableWeb. And you can use the Other Amazon APIs link on the left navigation of that page to see the 10 other Amazon APIs.

The Web Developer’s Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service: Developing Web Applications Using Amazon Web Services And PHP: by Jason Levitt. Published in May 2005 with good coverage of their core e-commerce API with code focused on using PHP 4 and 5.
Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds: by Paul Reinheimer. Just published this summer it covers Amazon plus a variety of other APIs (as you can tell from the long title). Has a good practical feel and the inclusion of web feed programming is key since that’s such a central piece of so many mashups. Being new it covers the latest versions of the APIs, which isn’t true for some of the other titles (see below).
Amazon.com Mashups (Wrox): Due in January from experienced mashup developer Francis Shanahan, creator of Zuggest and the cool Zollage. Looks like it will most of the key elements of Amazon’s ecommerce API and their S3 API and combining those with other web services out there.
There are a couple of other Amazon API-related books but are older and do not use examples from the latest API version: Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API by John Paul Mueller, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson, Amazon Hacks by Paul Bausch as part of the good O’Reilly Hacks series.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Books, General, HowTo at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

September 20th, 2006

Flickr Mashup Books

Want to learn how to code your own mashups? Try reading a book. There’s a growing library of books available now that are either fully or partially dedicated to programming mashups. I’ll start a series of posts on these books starting with a few for the Flickr API:

Building Flickr Applications with PHP: by Rob Kunkle and Andrew Morton for Apress. A new title just published two months ago. FYI, Andrew created Phlickr the handy PHP wrapper for Flickr’s API, which they make use of in the book.
Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online: another good one from the O’Reilly’s Hacks series, this one by Paul Bausch and Jim Bumgardner with a forward from Flickr founder Caterina Fake. The bulk of the book is on Flickr in general but the last two chapters dig into the API and coding Flickr mashups. Jim has created lots of very creative, very popular Flickr mashups including Coverpop and Color Fields Colr Pickr.
Flickr Mashups: by David M. Wilkinson for Wrox. Not yet published, due in January but looks interesting.

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Posted by John Musser as Books, HowTo, News, Yahoo, photo at 12:02 AM | 4 Comments »

September 4th, 2006

Adding An API to Your Web Service

Ryan Campbell over at Particletree wrote this nice introduction on How to Add an API to your Web Service. Good for beginning without too many assumptions about what you do or don’t know about things like REST or SOAP. He outlines many of the decisions you’ll have to make including data format support and error handling. See also some of the links in his Required Reading section for more.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, BestPractices, HowTo at 1:07 PM | 2 Comments »

August 25th, 2006

Tools for Google Maps

Mike Pegg does a great job tracking the most interesting maps mashups over at his Google Maps Mania. Occasionally he also does a roundup of tools for creating or enhancing Google Maps. Follow this link to see his eighth roundup of these tools along with links to the previous seven roundups. Good mix of Google Maps-focused tools.

ProgrammableWeb has a popular howto page that covers resources for a variety of APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as General, Google, HowTo, Mapping, Tools at 12:05 AM | 8 Comments »

August 23rd, 2006

Tips for Providing a Web API

Alex Bosworth over at Source Labs (and creator of the great open source resource SWiK) writes consistently good posts and Monday’s was no exception: How to Provide a Web API. In it he addresses the question of “What are a few simple rules for providing a web API?” with these five points:

Keep it clean and simple
Stick to standards
Make it about data
Keep it working
Design for updates

I completely agree with that list and might also add: a) provide examples, and b) document and support it. Neither of these need to be super extensive/expensive, just enough to get things kick-started (docs/examples) and help support the developer community as it grows.

This reminds me of Nat Torkington’s excellent post awhile back on How To Roll Out An Open API. He makes a good case that providers should: Make signup simple, offer toolkits for the languages that Internet developers use, and think laterally about business models. Recommended reading.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, BestPractices, HowTo at 12:05 AM | 5 Comments »

August 11th, 2006

On Bastard Apps

Duane Merrill over at IBM’s Developerworks just posted this good introductory overview Mashups: The new breed of Web app. He covers the various genres (as classified by tag here), the technologies including REST/SOAP, Ajax, RSS, RDF and screen scraping. And perhaps the most interesting part, the “Technical Challenges” section that looks at issues in data integration, data quality, and component model issues. There’s also a social challenges section with a quick look at licensing and commercialization issues.

Nicholas Carr followed-up on some of these issues in his post Bastard apps. He makes good points about data quality, reliability and consistency issues in what he calls Web 2.0’s truthiness problem.

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