API

One of my recent PHP projects had the requirement to filter out inappropriate language from user submitted content. After thinking about the problem briefly, I decided that I didn’t want to be writing the filter myself but, rather, find a third party service that could filter my text for me. By doing this, I eliminated the need to create and maintain a bad-word list, as well as saved the CPU cycles required to actually preform the search-and-replacement (Although, arguably, remote API calls are more expensive anyways).

There are a lot of web-sites out there, with a lot of data on them. Sometimes you are building a killer web-app and you just have to have some data off a certain site. The problem is, that particular site doesn’t have an API that you can just plug into! Never fear, using some simple tools, combined with the Zend Framework you can create your own web-scraping (screen-scraping) API in no time.

Translink is the local public transit provider for beautiful Vancouver, Canada. The system consists of Buses, Boats and Trains. Translink released an Iphone app some time ago that allows the lookup of bus information. Michael Weisman was kind enough to write about the “hidden” api that is used by the Iphone app to preform AJAX calls.

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation has an unpublished API that they use to pull data down for the flash application on their home page. The Zext PHP API exposes functionality to query the most resent winning numbers from the BCLC website, as well as retrieve current jackpot estimates for the main lotteries in this province.

Lately I have been writing Service API’s for Zext, my Zend Framework library extension. I plan on publishing some of the more useful ones over the next couple of months on my blog. The first of the series is the Epguides.com API.