I stumbled across YQL today and although I had heard about it in the past, today was the first time, I actually sat down and read the documentation and went through some of the example apps. I am amazed at how powerful it is and am just imagining the wonderful applications that can be built using YQL. It opens up the doors to pretty much anything using a SQL like syntax.
It took me literally 2 mins to come up with the following code which takes a UK postcode and returns you the latitude and longitude for it. Ok, getting this information is not a big deal, but the point is, how easy it is to do this stuff with YQL.
Here is the code for those who are interested.
[cf]
<cfset _query = ‘select postcode, lat, lon from ukgeocode where postcode = "hp13 6bj";’ />
<cfset _url = "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?format=json&env=http://datatables.org/alltables.env&q=#urlencodedformat(_query)#" />
<cfhttp url="#_url#" result="_data" />
<cfset _geo_code_data = deSerializeJson(_data.filecontent) />
<cfdump var = "#_geo_code_data#">
[/cf]
This is what I get when I run the above code
I dont think it can get any easier than this ?
I am going to dig deeper into YQL and explore all the options whenever I get some spare time.