Yahoo Search Web Services in a JSP
So wow, one of the first things I learned about when I started working at Yahoo has finally come out! Yay! I hate keeping secrets. :-) I think the initiative is great! Not just the service itself, but the philosophy behind the service. I love to see Yahoo opening up and embracing the developer community.
I have to say I immediately complained about the lack of support for 3GP in the video search (both on the main Yahoo Video Search page, and in the API) and it's still not in there. But since Video Search is clearly marked as Beta, I can see this changing soon. 3GP video will be the number one format of user generated video within the year, so it's pretty vital it's in there. (Especially when it's combined with blogging for enhanced meta-data. Example). If I didn't work at Y! I'd probably be screaming about morons, but the guys in Search are *really* smart guys and I'm sure are going to be adding that very important feature set in as soon as possible. (Nudge, nudge) ;-)
In preparation for the day when I can search by both 3GP as a file format and file size (so I can see which files are too big to easily download to my mobile) I whipped up a simple, self-contained JSP page that uses the video search service. I initially wanted it to compete with Rasmus' PHP example included in the SDK, though for mobiles, but after I got to the "it's working" stage, I lost interest (which is why I'm not a programmer any more). Making it "self-contained" meant using the JDK's XML APIs which are horrible and obtuse compared to something like JDOM, but I wanted it to be a drop-in sample into Tomcat, so I didn't use any external libraries.
You can check out what it looks like here, and view the source here. Nothing complex, just a nice little enclosed sample to get people started.
Neat. Okay, that's enough coding for this month.
-Russ