API Battles, Yahoo! vs Google
It’s always a neverending battle between the two top application development companies Yahoo! and Google. With a few very similar applications we take the opportunity to talk about them from a developer’s point of view and which ones we prefer for integration into existing projects.
The Great Map Debate
Google maps and Yahoo! maps are very close and very similar, even in the way the API documentation is layed out. Most of the time it is purely personal preference in which API you would use in a project. Both have attractive UIs and both share some of the same methods and functions. However it seems that you can do quite a bit more with the Google Maps API then you can with the Yahoo! API as it is more strongly supported by the developer community. For this we will have to score the Google Maps API a +1 just for its flexibility and expandability.
The Yahoo! maps API however is not that far behind. The documentation is easier on the eyes and it seems a hair bit easier for integration into your site. We found that Google’s APIs always struggle in the documentation area because most of the time it gets so darn confusing and you find yourself removing your hair prematurely.
The verdict:
Google APIs 1
Yahoo! APIs 1
Sharing Events
The next two apps are hard to compare. Google’s Calendar app has been out quite a bit longer then Yahoo!’s Upcoming app so it hasn’t seen much from the community development side. Also it is hard to compare the two since Google’s Calendar app has quite a different purpose. But, yes.. there is a but. If you need to share particular events and happenings on a site and don’t want to implement a CMS just for that, either of these two apps can do the job.
Google Calendar is great, it really is and we hate to rate it so low but for sharing events it just isn’t practical. The documentation is horrible and hard to understand. Their XML feed for a user just to grab events is hard to parse and in the end you find yourself with too much code and a lot of time developing.
Yahoo! upcoming takes a few minutes to include and by using a good PHP (or other programming language) XML parsing script you can have your RSS XML events feed parsed in no time and displayed on your site. The documentation is simple and straight forward and we haven’t had any issues where we needed to start posting in the API message board asking for help.
The verdict:
Google API 1
Yahoo! API 2
That’s it for now. As we continue to develop and work with the APIs we will release some how-tos on how to integrate some of these apps in your project.
Vince Angeloni
Alienworx Media Solutions
Tags: api, google api, google vs yahoo, yahoo api