Easy to access any WebService API using Perl

I'll introduce easy way to access and parse the any WebService API such as "Google API", "Flickr", "YouTube" etc. using my CPAN module "WebService::Simple".

First, install WebService::Simple from CPAN. The latest version is '0.16'.

Simple sample code is here:

use strict;
use warnings;
use WebService::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

my $flickr = WebService::Simple->new(
    base_url => "http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/",
    param    => { api_key => "your_api_key", }
);

my $response =
  $flickr->get( { method => "flickr.photos.search", text => "cat" } );
print Dumper $response->parse_response;

This program access to Flickr API, call the search photos method, parse the response as hash reference, and dump the object by Data::Dumper.

WebService::Simple helps us three things below.

1. Make the request url to API
2. Fetch the response from API includes contents ( XML, JSON etc. )
3. Parse the content to use ( by XML::Simple etc. )

So, any WebServices could be manipulated.

Let's see another sample code for searching YouTube videos.

use WebService::Simple;
use WebService::Simple::Parser::XML::Simple;
use XML::Simple;

my $keyword = shift || 'Michael Jackson';
my $xs = XML::Simple->new( KeyAttr => [], ForceArray => ['entry'] );
my $service = WebService::Simple->new(
    base_url => "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos",
    param    => { v => 2 },
    response_parser =>
      WebService::Simple::Parser::XML::Simple->new( xs => $xs ),
);

my $res = $service->get( { 'q' => $keyword, } );
my $ref = $res->parse_response();

for my $entry ( @{ $ref->{entry} } ) {
    print $entry->{link}->[0]->{href} . "\n";
}

WebService::Simple make it easy to access WebService API. Use it if you interested in :-)