Like most people with a digital camera, I tend to be a heavy Flickr user. Not only does Flickr make it easy to share my ever-growing photo collection with colleagues and family, but its drag-and-drop photo organizer and geo-tagging features make it easy to quickly categorize and find pictures from, say, my 2003 holiday in Goa.

The really good stuff, though, is hidden behind the scenes. Like many Web 2.0 applications, Flickr exposes its data to the public via a REST API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This REST API allows access to a number of important functions, including photo searching, tagging and uploading; photoset retrieval; contact retrieval; and panda recommendations. It’s also pretty easy to integrate this REST API into a PHP application – and this article will show you how!

Zend_Paginator does a great job of creating pagination for a site. In this blog post I’m demonstrating how to use Zend_Paginator to easily create pagination of Twitter tweets using Zend_Rest_Client to access the Twitter Services. As a bonus, Zend_Cache is used to store the tweets to make the process more efficient.

An excellent article has been posted on Federico Cargnelutti’s blog that steps the reader through the process of consuming a Web Service and building an application based upon it. In this example he builds a simple class that extends Zend_Rest_Client, that allows easy access to the Digg API.

p. Paddy is back and blogging! He has had a stream of great posts since he came back online. Thursday he posted a great REST tutorial. Click on inside and I’ll give you the details.