YQL Launched
Im really pleased to announce that my team released YQL today as part of the larger YOS 1.0 release. You can read some docs here, and even better, give it a test drive using our console.
Yahoo! makes a lot of structured data available to developers through its web services, like Flickr and Local, and through other sources like RSS (news) or CSV documents (finance). These services require developers to locate the right URLs for accessing them and the documentation for querying them. Data remains isolated and separated, requiring developers to combine and work on the data once it’s returned to them.
The YQL platform provides a mediator service that enables developers to query, filter, and combine data across Yahoo! and beyond. YQL exposes a SQL-like SELECT syntax that is both familiar to developers and expressive enough for getting the right data. Through the SHOW and DESC commands we attempt to make YQL self-documenting, enabling developers to discover the available data sources and structure without opening another web browser or reading a manual.
The YQL Web Service exposes just a single URL, http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql?q=[command] that is compiled for each query. We analyse the query to determine how to factor it across one or more web services. As much of the query as possible is reworked into web service REST calls, and the remaining aspects are performed the YQL service itself.
This is YQL 1.0 
We’re not “finished” and we’re continuing to work on new features that we feel/know are missing. Feedback and questions will help us focus on what our developers think are missing. We think the basic set of functionality now is already incredibly useful but, as we found with Pipes, I expect to find many things that it doesn’t do that would make it better.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
YQL is very entirely awesome, well done! My only problem is the entry cost. I can’t find any indication that you can access any of this without OAuth, yes? Which makes it nigh impossible to use for any lightweight purpose. Please tell me I’m wrong.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
You’re both right and wrong
If you just want to use public data then you just need to “sign” the request using the Consumer Key and Secret you get from YDN. No need to do the oauth dance, and you can use any library out there to do that (javascript etc).
http://developer.yahoo.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=261&st=0&gopid=657&#entry657
If you want private user data for someone else, then the oauth agreement step is clearly a good thing for all involved, and that’s harder work (but you can use the PHP SDK that YDN provides to take care of all of that too).
October 29th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
[...] I was involved in creating YQL and was responsible for leading the query engine implementation. I am very pleased to see it being released to the public today. Check out Jonathan’s talk which gives a great overview of YQL. (Jonathan’s posted about the YQL Launch here) [...]
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