November 9, 2008

BOSS at the Open Hack Day in Sao Paulo, Brazil

This weekend we were in Sao Paulo, Brazil to have about 400 hackers deliver 30 hacks on the first South American Open Hack Day. Further to Erik's general thoughts on the Open Hack Day (more to follow) here's a quick overview about the BOSS related happenings.

With the idea of promoting the Yahoo Open Strategy the Yahoo speakers present (Erik Eldridge, Zach Graves and me) agreed to concentrate each on one of the components of YOS. I got the task to introduce BOSS to the hack crowd and took the obvious route by explaining how to use it to find donkeys on the web:

During the course of the hack day I had more and more hackers ask me how to get and - more importantly - how to convert and display information when using BOSS. To make this whole affair a lot easier, I decided to write a small JavaScript wrapper library for BOSS called yboss. Using this one you can for example display the top search results, images and news items for the search term "obama" with the following few lines of code:

<div id="results"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="yboss-lib.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
YBOSS.get(
  {
    searches:'search,news,images',
    query:'obama',
    count:10,
    callback:change
  }
);
function change(o){
 var all = '<h4>Web Sites</h4>' + o.webHTML + 
           '<h4>News</h4>' + o.newsHTML +
           '<h4>News</h4>' + o.imagesHTML;
 var out = document.getElementById('results');
 out.innerHTML = all;
}
</script>

I've seen the library used in several hacks (including the winning hack for the BOSS category) which made me very happy. It is nice to make things easier for people.

Infected by the hack spirit of the event I also decided to have a bit of pointless fun with the API and created Yahoo! Fight!, a site to compare the amount of search results for two different terms.

Please notice the amount of getting overboard with this by checking out the API this is based on and the JavaScript wrapper to style the API output. If wanted, I am happy to do a writeup on how they work.

So, why not have a go at hacking together some BOSS-based products yourself?

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at November 9, 2008 4:19 PM

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