Ext

Early last week Yahoo announced they had released a new search API dubbed “BOSS” for “Build your Own Search Service” - wow, snazzy name. So being the explorer that I am, I started to play with it and poke around in the API - hold on! this is just the same search API service they offered up a while ago - what gives?

Benefits of the new Program

Turns out that BOSS comes without the limitations imposed on their previous search API. This gives everyone the ability to take Yahoo’s search result and re-use them in any way they want. No branding needed, no restrictions on how you are able re-format or merge the information, and no limit on the number of queries you can run.

They provide data for the following categories:

• Web
• News
• Images
• Spelling

The Job at Hand

So with my new-found knowledge of Yahoo’s guilt-free data, I put together a panel that displays the data, allowing integration of custom searches into a single interface. The searches run using BOSS to acquire web, news, and image results from Yahoo. Data is displayed in a DataView, with each result formatted to my liking using a custom template. Results can be paged, and the ComboBox in the paging bar can be used to switch between search services in this example.

Communication between ExtJS and Yahoo is done via a server side proxy, which also handles some data cleanup. This was fairly simple to accomplish - the Yahoo BOSS group even has some user contributed classes to use. I ended up implementing the PHP class posted by Jake. They also provide a callback feature so the data store could be populated without having to use a server side proxy.

Summary

In this example used to display BOSS results, a few form fields provide the functionality that allows searching. Results are displayed using DataView with a paging toolbar. I enabled template swapping based on the type of search that’s performed - that way image results are displayed two wide and web search results display in single rows.

The source files for this experiment can be found here and the live demo here. Play around with BOSS in your ExtJS applications! The possible uses of BOSS are endless.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under Ext JS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.