The Google AJAX Feed API for use with FeedAPI module

Posted by budda on December 7, 2007 at 4:15pm

Has anybody bothered to take a look at the Google Ajax Feed API with the intention of using it for Drupal aggregation?

We've implemented client side aggregation for a project being released soon. This gives a similar experience to NetVibes.

Googles Feed API only exposes all the feed data via Javascript API calls, however my thoughts are could this be accessed via PHP from the server side to extract all the parsed data from Googles servers, and then drupal_execute() it in to the Drupal node system?

Maybe it would work as an alternative parser engine for the Drupal FeedAPI module?

Just some thoughts to put out there. I've had no time to research the feasability for this.

If it did work, it would remove the mammouth task of parsing thousands of feeds on your own server every minute of the day (and using Python ;-) ).

Comments

Any write up on your project

Posted by cirotix on December 7, 2007 at 4:45pm

Your Netvibes-like project looks very intersting and I am looking forward to see it. Any write-up on how you did that ?

Damien Cirotteau
http://www.rue89.com

There's a few recent

Posted by budda on December 7, 2007 at 4:55pm

There's a few recent projects we're intending on doing write ups about in the new year - just need to find some time in the day.

Yeah,

Posted by NikLP on January 12, 2008 at 4:08pm

I'm having some thoughts in this general direction. Need some time to experiment with some code...

Kineta Systems - Web Development in Nottingham, UK

Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems / Follow me on Twitter! @NikLP

Hi Budda, Not knowing

Posted by alex_b on January 14, 2008 at 2:34pm

Hi Budda,

Not knowing Google's AJAX FeedAPI I've got some questions.

I can follow that you can save server power by offloading parsing to Google+Client. But if you're talking about feeding this data back to the server - wouldn't you still have to parse something? Not the RSS feed directly anymore, but Google's parsed format (JSON?).

Those questions aside, you should be able to integrate Google's FeedAPI into Drupal with Drupal's FeedAPI by writing a FeedAPI parser.

Alex

http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth

You can get xml straight

Posted by NikLP on January 15, 2008 at 3:36pm

You can get xml straight from google (reader api) using the level 2 functionality in the (unofficial) API spec.

I'm not sure if it passes out xml in a format that feedapi can read directly, but that would be nice.

Looking back, I'm not sure I should have bothered writing this post, but hey... :)

Kineta Systems - Web Development in Nottingham, UK

Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems / Follow me on Twitter! @NikLP

Yup that is correct.

Posted by budda on January 30, 2008 at 9:23am

Yup that is correct. Although the whole fact that it's not official wasn't a great point for a clients project. Having to (possibly) play keep up with Google could become a pain.

I'm kinda working on something like this.

Posted by cosmicdreams on January 29, 2008 at 11:12pm

I'm trying to write a module to synchronize events between drupal event module and Google Calendar. It uses the Google Data API which is XML based. I'd love to leverage the code you guys have already written to help me complete my module.

The links you give Google through the GoogleCalendarAPI are standardized and can be hardcoded into the module all I need is an easy way to issue the links to Google and easy way to handle the XML that is returned and I can deal with the rest.

http://drupal.org/project/event_GCalendar

Software Engineer @ The Nerdery

The code we've developed is

Posted by budda on January 30, 2008 at 9:24am

The code we've developed is mainly JavaScript based, and then fires the extracted data to the server via an ajax call back to the Drupal site.

There's not much Drupal specific - just some XML parsing at the end of the ajax call IIRC.

Related: Has somebody played

Posted by alex_b on January 30, 2008 at 3:39pm

Related: Has somebody played with SimplePie's Live service? Answer here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/8545

http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth

It sounds like a potentially

Posted by budda on January 30, 2008 at 4:03pm

It sounds like a potentially expensive hosting bill for the SimplePie guys if it gets used a lot. As they are just a couple of students (or used to be) I would be wary about counting on their service for anything critical/commercial.

Haven't used the service to know if its any better than Google Feed API though.

I might have something to share soon

Posted by sethcohn on January 2, 2009 at 4:09pm

Looks like I'll be implementing this shortly for a client. More soon.

I'm new to drupal (also to

Posted by sebasmagri on March 17, 2009 at 3:18pm

I'm new to drupal (also to php and javascript) and I'm very interested on having something similar to what you plan to do. What I specifically want is a block which I can create giving it the feed's url, the number of entries, the label and the display mode, and then simply include it in the regions I need. I'm already researching about how to build custom blocks and integrate it in drupal.

What I've been thinking about the content on view() is to show simple html/js from the feed API.

Am I taking the right aproach? any recommendations?

I'm sorry if my words are confusing, English is not my native language...

Free as in Freedom...
Gentoo Linux Proud User...

My success plan so far

Posted by doublejosh on March 18, 2009 at 5:14pm

So far I've had success with using Feed API and views. Then placing view blocks into regions. With an argument or two you can have quite a bit of power with just this alone. Suppose also thanks to SimplePie.

Though if you don't need all the Feed API power, don't be afraid to fall back on SimpleFeed. It's pretty rad right out of the box and handles some of the things in one module that you otherwise have to add on to Feed API.