Using Web Service APIs (Amazon and Yahoo!) with PEAR - Further Steps
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As we've seen, using third party web services can let you add features to your site, which would not be possible otherwise. Most sites can't afford to have an index of nearly every book on the planet, or crawl and catalog web sites, news sites, images and more... but they can make use of the tools provided by companies who do.
While most of these APIs are relatively simple, using a pre-written API can make the development time much shorter and decrease the number of bugs created by corner cases and strange API exceptions. You'll thank yourself for not reinventing the wheel.
In addition to the packages discussed here, the PEAR Web Services directory provides APIs for many other sites, including: YouTube, TinyURL, TechnoRati, Digg and Facebook. Check out the directory yourself; you may be surprised at what is included. At the time of this writing, there was a total of 34 different Web Service APIs available for PEAR, with more being added all the time.
Next time you're faced with building a new feature which seems too monumental to tackle on your own, peruse the PEAR Web Services repository. It's likely that a Web Service already exists for your purpose, and a handy PEAR package is already written!
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