A mashup... is a hybrid web application that uses data from an outside source to drive a web service. Mashups can be created using data culled from RSS feeds, public databases, or any open data source.
There's a current industry trend in which big name websites like Yahoo, Amazon and Google are offering access to their public databases and live content through the use of their publicly available programming interfaces, or APIs. Programmers can use the APIs to gather and parse data from these sites, and then incorporate that data into their own applications. The result is a new breed of website — fully integrated hybrids containing both new data and repurposed data, all presented in refreshing and unexpected ways.
Flickr (T)he photo storage and sharing site...offers a flexible API that can accept calls and return results for tags, photos, user names, contacts, and even the nebulous popularity ranking called "interestingness." The Flickr API also has several wrappers written by third party developers that make it usable within other programming environments such as Flash, PHP, python, Java, Perl and Ruby.
article with links by Michael Calore | Webmonkey
Posted by Cieciel at February 25, 2006 03:25 PM