As a member of the APML Google group, I’m constantly reading and keeping in touch with the APML developments. The latest development that sparked my interest was the need for a JSON equivalent of the APML standard which could be used as a more lightweight interchange format for more efficient web application implementations of the APML spec.
David Novakovic put his hand up to start working on the JSON-APML spec, and naturally, I decided to give him a hand. We decided to make the JSON-APML spec as close to the XML version as possible without the bloat of XML. You can read more about the spec proposed over at the JSON-APML Google Groups thread. Feel free to join the group and give your thoughts about the spec proposed.
Given this spec, I decided to do a quick working example of using the JSON-APML format. The example I created uses a service created by Paul Lamere over at Tastebroker. Paul’s script scrapes profile data from various websites, and returns a well-formed APML feed. My script uses these feeds as a base for conversion into the JSON-APML spec.
How it works:
The demo connects to a server with user and service information. The server then scrapes Paul’s APML feeds for a given user/service, parses the APML into JSON-APML and returns it to the browser. The browser then formats the data into a tag cloud using javascript.
Check the example of APML-JSON out.