Davs Rants and Random Thoughts

Using YAHOO.util.Get and Pipes together can open up some pretty powerful doors..

If you don’t know what Pipes is, here is a snippet from their homepage:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

If you don’t know what YAHOO.util.Get is, here is a snippet from it’s homepage:

The Get Utility provides a mechanism for attaching script and css resources — including cross-domain resources — to the DOM after the page has loaded.

Basically Pipes allows us to take data from different sources, mash them up and spit them out as a combined data stream. One of the best parts of this, is that you can have Pipes render your data in JSON format. And we all know that JSON is a really nice way to get data into a webpage.. However, if we combine this awesome tool with the new Get Utility included in the latest YUI release, we get do some kewl stuff

I have whipped up a couple of simple examples using 2 different pipes and a couple of YUI controls..

The first example uses Get and this Pipe. The pipe grabs an RSS feed from Yahoo! Weather and splits up the HTML source in the description leaving us with a nice JSON array.

Doing a little JS/CSS mojo, we get something like this.

In the second example, I have used this pipe. This pipe will grab a Yahoo! news feed and convert it to a JSON object that we can parse. I built this example to populate a TabView Control with the news data without a server side proxy..

Now these are some really simple examples that I built in about a half an hour, but I hope you can see the potential here for some really kewl projects..

Happy Hacking..

Example #1

Example #2