Yahoo! Query Language, Empower Your Mashups
Yahoo! announced yesterday YQL (Yahoo! Query Language), an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. The idea itself is amazing to use a structured query language format to manipulate data across the web.
YQL support select, insert, update and delete, in addition to pre-defined tables for popular Yahoo! Web services such as Flickr, Social, MyBlogLog, and Search. Data manipulated could be either in HTML, XML, JSON, RSS, Atom, or microformat; and result in XML or JSON which make it more practical to use in your web applications server-side or client-side using JavaScript and Ajax. For javascript JSON is recommended and easier to manipulate, there is also JSON-P and JSON-P-X.
For example you can perform a BOSS search that also returns an image from the BOSS image search for the same site and query term in a single result set using (try this example in YQL console) :
use 'http://yqlblog.net/samples/search.imageweb.xml' as searchimageweb; select * from searchimageweb where query='pizza'
Yahoo! and other websites across the Internet make much of their structured data available to developers, primarily through Web services. To access and query these services, developers traditionally endure the pain of locating the right URLs and documentation to access and query each Web service. With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs
YQL usage is restricted to 1000 call/hour/day per IP or 100,000 calls/day per application using the API Access Key. Two years ago Yahoo! released Pipes, an amazing mashup tool but limited to RSS, today YQL is here to cover everything you need to manipulate different kind of data. YQL is huge and expect to see more amazing mashups popping out in the next few days.
More information at Official YQL website, and YQL Calls With PHP.
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