Screaming Penguin

I have been working on a few Android apps lately that use various public APIs. Some of these APIs are excellent, easy to use, sensible, some are, well, not. To make a long story short, I ended up stumbling on the Yahoo Query Language (YQL). This is a fantastic thing. Maybe I am late to this party, having never seen or used YQL before, but basically it's a common and public front end for various public APIs. It's a big wrapper (with one format) around all of the intermash. Take a quick look, really, you can use the console in an instant and get an idea of what it is. An SQL like syntax is provided, and of course it works over HTTP. A concept called "open data tables" allows developers to "map" APIs into the YQL system - genius. Another example:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=

And then pass in your query (which must be url encoded, of course):

use 'http://yqlblog.net/samples/search.imageweb.xml' as searchimageweb; 
select * from searchimageweb where query='pizza' 

YQL example URL I haven't incorporated YQL into any Android apps, yet, but I do plan to investigate it more and possibly use it to replace a few custom parsers I am using. +1 for Yahoo.