In this new tutorial on the IBM developerWorks website, they show you how - with a little simple HTML and PHP - to integrate functionality from the YouTube API into your site.

The YouTube video sharing site allows Web application developers to access public content through its REST-based developer API. [...] This article introduces the YouTube Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated video content; access video metadata, comments and responses; and perform keyword searches.

They help you get started by outlining the format that the YouTube messages use (Atom feeds) and how to run a query against the API and return back the custom data for things like video categories, popularity and the results of keyword searches.

On his blog, Andreas Gohr has posted about various charting applications on the web (in his search for a way to show off the stats for DokuWiki) and looking specifically at the Google Charts.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.

Hasin Hayder has proposed an interesting replacement for the usual caching mechanism - using the Facebook data storage API to cache copies of pages/data/etc.

Why not! All you need is a fast-n-furious caching storage for your Facebook application which stores values against a key, same like a hash table. Facebook data storage API does the same for you. using the batch API in Facebook rest client you can seriously think it as an alternative of memcache.

He shows the simple process for making the object (manually in a preexisting application), inserting data into the object through the API they provide and how to pull that data back out.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, Akash Mehta has posted his look at having search functionality on your website.

Today's websites have a lot of content. [...] Needless to say, effectively searching all that data can be a real challenge, and chances are at the end of the day you'll still be stuck with a slow and ineffective search system. [...] Implementing effective search doesn't have to be hard. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.

He includes a (very) brief look at the search API Yahoo! offers followed by examples of queries and then on to the real deal, a search system that takes in a user query and asks the Yahoo! API for results matching it. The results are outputted below the box.

In a new post, Greg Beaver talks about a few things, the main one being a new release of the phar extension he's made - phar version 2.0.0a1 - a reworking of the previous functionality with loads of new features including:

• Phar now supports tar and zip archives with the same API that is supports phar archives.
• Phar has a front controller for web applications that fully handles MIME types, supports mod_rewrite-like functionality with far more flexibility
• Phar supports phar:// stream wrappers in include_path for PHP 5.2+
• Phar supports creation and modification of data-only tar and zip archives (no executable phar stub) via the PharData class.

There've also been updates to the manual for the project to reflect this new version of its API. You can download this latest version here: source or Windows DLL.

Hasin Hayder has posted an example of a "world time search" he's worked up that uses the geonames.org and Yahoo! developer APIs to pin down the time at any given location.

I recently came by this site WorldTimeEngine where users can search the local time of any place using the name, street address or just latitude and longitude. Since that time I was thinking how easily you can make your own. As long there are some good people over there (For Geocoding API) - its a not a big deal, you know?

His script pulls the location of the place (latitude/longitude) from the Yahoo! geocoding API and passes that back into the geonames web service to get the local time. The result is an array with the lat/long, address you submitted and the time output in a standard string.

In a quick new blog post to the NorthClick blog, Soenke Ruempler points out that, due to some updates made by Rob Richards, the Spread extension for PECL is back in working order again.

Yesterday I got an e-mail that two of my PECL bug reports for the spread module have been fixed. It seems that it gets some recent love from Rob Richards who commited some fixes and cleanups.

The Spread functionality allows developers to create messaging services by acting as a message bus between the clients and between the client/servers.

Mike Gauthier has created a PEAR-based implementation for the popular Akismet spam filtering system that he's added to the site:

I'd like to let you know about a new PHP 5 implementation of the Akismet REST API. The package, Services_Akismet is MIT licensed and distributed through the official PEAR channel at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Akismet.

Hopefully this will make it even easier for third-party PHP projects to use Akismet spam tools. The code is well documented and should "just work" on any PHP 5.2.1+ system.

It's currently in its alpha stage and was derived from the miPHP Akismet class written by Bret Kuhns.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode in their PHP Abstract podcast series today - an advanced look at using APIs in PHP from Davey Shafik.

Today's special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey Shafik is a full time developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both books and magazines and no stranger to the regular listeners of PHP Abstract. Today, Davey is going to talk to take an advanced look at APIs.

You can grab this latest bit of PHP audio goodness three ways - from the on-page player, via a subscription to the podcast feed or just by downloading the mp3.

Tobias Schlitt has posted a handy tip about using the Reflection API in PHP5 - specifically its accessing of private properties in a class.

I recently stumbled over reflecting private properties in PHP again. As you might know, this was not possible until now and if you tried this [code] PHP thanked it to you with this [error that is cannot access a non-public member].

He notes that, while the behaviour is correct, it still makes things like metaprogramming impossible. So, what's a developer to do? Patch it of course! Tobias and Derick Rethans persuaded two other developers (Derick and Marcus Borger) to include a patch that allows the Reflection API to see these private variables.

To make it work, you have to use the setAccessible method on the Reflection object to set which of the properties you want to be able to get at.