Blending the Google and Amazon Web Services
A blending of the Google and Amazon web service APIs.
Google doesnât have a lock on the API concept. Other companies and sites, including online bookstore Amazon, have their own APIs. Mockerybirdâs Book Watch Plus (http://mockerybird.com/bookwatch-plus/bookwatch-plus.cgi) blends the Google and Amazon APIs with a feed of information from the Book Watch service (http://onfocus.com/BookWatch/) to create a list of books, referrals to them in Google, and a list of items that people who bought that book on Amazon also bought. Figure 6-15 illustrates this.
Figure 6-15. Book Watch Plus
How It Works
Book Watch Plus does several things to generate its page of information. First, it grabs a page of books most frequently mentioned on weblogs. That list is generated by another service run by Paul Bauschâs Book Watch service.
Book Watch Plus wrangles the ISBNs (unique identifiers for books) and then places a couple of calls. The first is to the Amazon web service for detailed information on the book. Then Google is queried via the Google Web API for items related to the book. All this information is aggregated on a regular basis rather than on the fly for each visitor. Results are cached in XML and displayed in the form of a web page via the HTML::Template Perl module.
Tip
You might think that with all this fetching and displaying of information, ...
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