On the Zend Developer Zone today the first part of a series from Vikram Vaswani has been posted. This new set of articles will look at how to use the Stack Exchange API from your PHP applications.

The thing about Stack Overflow, though, is that it has a geeky secret of its own. Like many Web 2.0 applications, it exposes its data to the public via the Stack Exchange Web service API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This API allows access to a number of important functions, including searching for questions, retrieving answers and comments, accessing user profiles, and working with tags and badges. It's also pretty easy to integrate this API into a PHP application - and this two-part article will show you how!

In part one he introduces you to some of the conventions and tips you'll need to know when reading through the article. He shows how to get and parse a sample response (with json_decode). He also uses the proposed StackPHP PEAR package to make requests for general question information, specific details, tags, comments and search results.