Including any Web Service in Drupal using YQL

There is lots of great content and services available through web services, or even page scrapping. However web services all have different architectures (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, etc) and authentication schemes (HTTP-Basic, OAuth, etc) which makes them a pain to include in your Drupal site.

Yahoo! offers a service called YQL which allows you to access lots of web services or even scrape web pages using a syntax like SQL. This makes it really easy to access web data and include it in your Drupal site.

You can also use YQL to update services like Twitter, providing tight integration with minimal work. Since the SQL-like syntax is familiar it's really easy to integrate many services together such as shortening a url to new content created in Drupal with bit.ly and posting it to Twitter automatically.

This talk will show the basics of YQL and demonstrate how to integrate YQL into Drupal sites. The examples are all practical and the audience will be able to use them immediately.