The YDN Python Developer Center
8th August 2006
I recently had the opportunity to put together the Python Developer Center for the Yahoo! Developer Network. YDN is one of my favourite parts of Yahoo! so I jumped at the chance, and the resulting mini-site is now online (YDN blog post here).
The bulk of the content is the HOWTOs, which discuss ways of accessing Yahoo! APIs using Python:
- Make Yahoo! Web Service REST calls with Python
- Cache API calls using Python
- Parse JSON using Python
- Parse XML using Python
- Access the Yahoo! Search APIs using pYsearch
- Access Yahoo! RSS feeds using Python
I had a lot of fun playing around with different ways of accessing the APIs and working out which ones were the most natural fit. The HOWTOs use urllib, urllib2 and xml.dom.minidom from the standard library, but also discuss httplib2, ElementTree and simplejson as third party libraries that are worth investigating. Naturally, feedparser is the recommended tool for accessing Yahoo!’s multitude of RSS feeds.
Python really is a fantastic language for exploring web service APIs. All of the example code for the HOWTOs was first written in an interactive prompt and then copied to a file once it was working. Test-first development is certainly an important technique, but the power of interactive development should never be underestimated.
More recent articles
- Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data - 1st December 2023
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023
- DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema - 30th October 2023