JSON is short for Javascript Object Notation, and it's a cross-language data representation standard, which also happens to be native javascript. This makes it really easy to process this data on the client side, either as a XMLHTTPRequest, or if you want to use it cross-domain, you can use a callback function and a javascript include node.
That makes it easy to generate dynamic html from iusethis data on the client-side. First we define a function to output data:
function fill_node(data) {
$('iusethis').innerHTML='<p><img src="'+data.app.icon+'"/> '+
data.app.name+' used by '+data.app.usecount+' people.</p>';
}
Note that the $() function is a common function provided by several javascript frameworks as an alias for document.getElementById . And yes, I know this pretty quick and dirty, but it serves ok as an example of using JSON data.
Now all that remains is to load the JSON and make it call your function.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://osx.iusethis.com/json/iterm?callback=fill_node"></script>
And presto, you have dynamically updated content on your website, without any serverside requirements at all.
For reference, Here is an overview of the data return in the app object:
- universal:
- 1 for apps that work on powerpc and intel, 0 otherwise
- icon:
- URL to the app icon
- version:
- Version number of the latest release
- name:
- The full name of the app
- description:
- The description of the software from iusethis
- license:
- The license of the software
- tags:
- An array of the tags given to the app
- homepage:
- URL to the home page of the app
- short
- The URI identifier of the app
- user_count:
- Number of users of the app on iusethis
- download
- Link to download the app
- screenshot
- URL to a screenshot of the app
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