Viewing posts tagged with movies

Movie Lookup Sneak Preview

Following on from my previous post about a Movie Catalogue and APIs, I've finally got round to coding the movie lookup / auto-complete tool that will be used to easily add movies into my database.

Movie Lookup Sneak Preview

It uses the built-in autocomplete method in jQuery UI, and queries my PHP script which grabs the search results from the Rotten Tomatoes API, strips out all the unnecessary data, and outputs the JSON.

Speed is a bit of an issue, and I would have it query the API directly instead of having to use a Intermediary script, but the API requires a key that's unique to me and needs to remain hidden, so sadly there's no room for improvement there.

07-Jun-2011 at 4:45pm

Movie Catalogue and APIs

I've always wanted somewhere I can catalog all my DVDs and Blu Rays. Somewhere I can instantly see what I've got, view movie details, rate them, and easily add new movies.

Extracting data from IMDB would be perfect but sadly, the IMDB API is out of reach for me with the annual membership cost in the low tens of thousands of dollars. However, lately I've discovered and been playing around with a mixture of the unofficial IMDB API, Rotten Tomatoes API and TMBd API, all of which are very simple, have high usage allowances, and are completely free.

Rotten Tomatoes is by far looking the most stable, informative, and simple with movie look-ups as easy as this:{API_KEY}&q=I+Saw+The+Devil&page_limit=1

At the moment, I'm still in the 'playing around' stage, which will be quickly followed by the 'do I actually have enough free time to build it' stage. Maybe in the near future you may see some Dribbble shots of what I'm working on.

If you want to read up more on any of the API's mentioned, follow the links below:

10-May-2011 at 6:02pm