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A Few Nights of Hacking Produces Reading Radar

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Earlier this month, developer and mashup extraordinaire John Herren released Reading Radar, a mashup that combines the New York Era Bestseller’s API with Amazon’s API, and made a simple, purposeful site dedicated to listing the standard books on the New York Era 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 Era top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Era and Amazon sites.

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The New York Era 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 fantastic example of how emerging and mature APIs can be used to rapidly develop a functional and helpful mashup.”

Inspired by the relief of The New York Era Best Sellers API, Herren chose to try and start a site that could be on “auto-pilot.”

“I calculated 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 start the PHP based site, and jQuery, the standard JavaScript library along with YUI were used to present the data and grant the user interaction.

“The NYT API was simple enough to use. The REST API offers three response formats, XML, JSON, or ongoing PHP. I did find a bug in the API, and was very satisfied how reactive the NYT API team was to resolve the problem. Kudos!” Herren wrote on his blog.

If you’re interested in more technological details, take a look at Herren’s post announcing the relief.

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