A few days ago I spotted a Twitter conversation between Simon Whatley and Christian Heilmann which brought YQL back into my mind. In case you don't know, YQL stands for Yahoo Query Language is 'an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services'. In short, it's a sort of API to a lot of other APIs, and then some. It's also very easy to use since it's effectively just like SQL. For example you can use this example query to get details about a specific Vimeo video. But not only can you query web services using YQL, you can even scrape HTML pages which do not expose an API - very powerful stuff.

Flickr is one of the APIs that's also supported and I figured that it would be a great addition to one of my products, Scribblar, if a user could get easy access to all the images for a given keyword which are released under a Creative Commons license. Again this is very easy with YQL using a query such as this one.

I've created a simple Flex app which wraps the functionality provided by YQL and the Flickr API. You can check it out here. The source overview is here, and the downloadable zip here.