Creating Flex based mashup using Yahoo Flickr and YPipes APIs

Venom Ponders:

Come Yahoo Hack day and the feeling sinks in pretty bad that you are a lone warrior without any knowledge of Yahoo API implementation. But then again there is a venomous relief that creativity is not marked by an overlap with that of someone else collaborating on the same project. A couple of Red Bulls downed and after an hour of poring into the Flickr Search API and YPipes , I was redeemed by a light at the end of a tunnel which had nothing to do with the beautiful Yahoo HR seated next to me.So I pondered on looking into the blank Flex Builder screen and came up with this idea, albeit not too jazzy but a useful utility.

Roll up the sleeves:

Being my first attempt at a mashup , I have tried to keep the functionality simple at the cost of appearing overtly scrupulous. The basic concept idea came from a Harry Potter inspiration , the Daily Prophet which had excitedly moving images ,or flvs in layman terms, along with the news.

The application takes a tag as input for three different feeds :

• The first feed is a Flickr search using the search APIs while accepting the result format into an XML . From the resultant XML tags, I have extracted the necessary ids as mentioned here to create the URL that retrieves the images which are laid out using the Card Layout component developed by my friend Raghu. Clicking on any of the lower cards brings them up .
• The second feed is derived using a Yahoo Pipe from news.yahoo.com as it accepts the same tag value
• The third feed uses a YouTube Pipe and a small hack to get the videos directly in place instead of getting the link

All the various feeds are collated into a single application for a single tag .The mode of access being a baisc HTTPService request.The app also uses this nifty little Reflection component of Narciso Jaramillo.
DISCLAIMER: Due to time constraints, dint get to customize the application further so as to make the video portion more usable with controls and avod simultaneous playback. The tags work fine when short and sweet but shows problems with multiple tags and long tag names, something I need to fix when I get around with more time in hand

Venom Effect:

Being an AIR application, this needs the Adobe AIR runtime which be downloaded from Adobe Labs .

Experience the application here

Screenshot of the application :

The source code for the application is here

Hack Day :

Yahoo hack Day, Bangalore was conducted at the Taj in a fundoo informal way. Was a great place to meet developers and people working in RIAs and a learning tipper into new technologies.

Here are the snaps from the event :