Earlier this month, developer and mashup extraordinaire John Herren released Reading Radar, a mashup that combines the New York Times Bestseller’s API with Amazon’s API, and created a simple, purposeful site dedicated to listing the popular books on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Using various open source technologies such as jQuery, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Maintainable Framework, Reading Radar lets you scan the New York Times top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Times and Amazon sites.
The New York Times released their API on January 27; Herren had Reading Radar up by February 3. As the Programmable Web points out “This mashup serves as a great example of how emerging and mature APIs can be used to rapidly develop a functional and useful mashup.”
Inspired by the release of The New York Times Best Sellers API, Herren decided to try and create a site that could be on “auto-pilot.”
“I designed the site to use extensive caching of the NYT and Amazon APIs to minimize remote calls, but update the data often enough so that the information would be fresh.”
The Maintainable Framework and the Zend framework provided a means to create the PHP based site, and jQuery, the popular JavaScript library along with YUI were used to present the data and provide the user interaction.
“The NYT API was simple enough to use. The REST API offers three response formats, XML, JSON, or serialized PHP. I did find a bug in the API, and was very pleased how reactive the NYT API team was to resolve the problem. Kudos!” Herren wrote on his blog.
If you’re interested in more technical details, take a look at Herren’s post announcing the release.
