NAME

WebService::Embedly - Perl interface to the Embedly API

VERSION

Version 0.04

SYNOPSIS

 use WebService::Embedly;
 use Ouch qw(:traditional);

 my $embedly = WebService::Embedly->new({ api_key => 'get_your_key_at_embed.ly',
					     maxwidth => 500 });

 my $oembed_ref;
 my $e = try {
   $oembed_ref = $embedly->oembed('http://youtu.be/I8CSt7a7gWY');
 };

 if ( catch_all, $e) {
    warn("embedly api failed: ".$e);
    return;
 }

 #made it here, everything good.
 my $embed_html = $oembed_ref->{html};

DESCRIPTION

The WebService::Embedly is a class implementing for querying the Embed.ly web service. Prior to using this module you should go to http://embed.ly and sign up for an api_key.

You can quickly try out the API by executing: ./sample/usage.pl --apikey you_api_key_from_embed.ly

WebService::Embedly exposes three methods: oembed, preview, objectify. Each method has additional bits of metadata about the request URL. oembed method follows the oembed standard documented here http://oembed.com/

Refer to http://embed.ly to learn more about the data that is returned for preview http://embed.ly/docs/endpoints/1/preview and objectify http://embed.ly/docs/endpoints/2/objectify

Exception handling is used to expose failures. The Ouch module (:traditional) is used to handle try/catch blocks. See the Exception block below for all the possible catches. Example:

my $e = try {
  $oembed_ref = $embedly->oembed('http://youtu.be/I8CSt7a7gWY');
};

if ( catch 500, $e) {
   #Server is down
   return;
}
if ( catch 401, $e) {
   #Your API key has used all its credits
   return;
}
elsif ( catch_all, $e) {
   #I hate the individual exception catching, lets get this over with it.
   return;
}

WebService::Embedly uses Mouse (lighter version of Moose) to handle its object management.

CONSTRUCTOR

You must pass the api_key into the constructor:

my $embedly = WebService::Embedly->new({ api_key => 'get_your_key_at_embed.ly'});

WebService::Embedly uses LWP::UserAgent to handle its web requests. You have the option to pass in your own LWP object in case of special requirements, like a proxy server:

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->proxy('http', 'http://proxy.sn.no:8001/');

my $embedly = WebService::Embedly->new({ api_key => 'get_your_key_at_embed.ly',
                                  ua => $ua
                                });

Optional Params

WebService::Embedly supports all optional parameters at the time of this writing http://embed.ly/docs/endpoints/arguments. Refer to the embedly documentation for the complete description. In the majority of cases you only need to pay attention to the maxwidth param. It is highly recommended to specify maxwidth since the embed html could overflow the space you provide for it.

maxwidth

This is the maximum width of the embed in pixels. maxwidth is used for scaling down embeds so they fit into a certain width. If the container for an embed is 500px you should pass maxwidth=500 in the query parameters.

maxheight

This is the maximum height of the embed in pixels.

width

Will scale embeds type rich and video to the exact width that a developer specifies in pixels.

format (default: json)

The response format – Accepted values: (xml, json)

callback

Returns a (jsonp) response format. The callback is the name of the javascript function to execute.

wmode

Will append the wmode value to the flash object. Possible values include window, opaque and transparent.

allowscripts (default: false)

By default Embedly does not return script embeds for jsonp requests. They just don’t work and cause lots of issues. In some cases, you may need the script tag for saving and displaying later. Accepted values: (true, false)

nostyle (default: false)

There are a number of embeds that Embedly has created including Amazon.com, Foursquare, and Formspring. These all have <style> elements and inline styles associated with them that make the embeds look good. Accepted values: (true, false)

autoplay (default: false)

This will tell the video/rich media to automatically play when the media is loaded. Accepted values: (true, false)

videosrc (default: false)

Either true Embedly will use the video_src meta or Open Graph tag to create a video object to embed. Accepted values: (true, false)

words

The words parameter has a default value of 50 and works by trying to split the description at the closest sentence to that word count.

chars

chars is much simpler than words. Embedly will blindly truncate a description to the number of characters you specify adding ... at the end when needed.

EXCEPTIONS

All exceptions are thrown in terms of http status codes. Exceptions from the web service are passed through directly. For example http://embed.ly/docs/endpoints/1/oembed and scroll down to view the Error Codes. For most situations you can simply do this:

my $e = try {
  $oembed_ref = $embedly->oembed('http://youtu.be/I8CSt7a7gWY');
};

if ( catch_all, $e) {
   warn("embedly api failed: ".$e);
   #do something...
}

METHODS

oembed;

preview;

objectify;

Embed.ly provide three different methods: oembed, preview, objectify depending on the amount of information/access you need each take the same parameters. However different data is returned depending on which method used.

There are three ways to call each method

Single URL

Fetch metadata about a single URL - call method with full url as a string

$oembed_ref = $embedly->oembed('http://youtu.be/I8CSt7a7gWY');

Multiple URLs

Fetch metadata about multiple URLs - call method with array ref of urls

my @urls = qw(http://yfrog.com/ng41306327j http://twitter.com/embedly/status/29481593334 http://blog.embed.ly/31814817 http://soundcloud.com/mrenti/merenti-la-karambaa);
$oembed_ref = $embedly->oembed(\@urls);

Extra Information

Fetch metadata about URL(s) and include additional query arguments http://embed.ly/docs/endpoints/arguments - call methods with with hash ref of attributes

my $query_ref = {

Can throw an exception (ouch) so wrap in an eval or use Ouch module and refer to its syntax

AUTHOR

Jason Wieland, <jwieland at cpan.org>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-www-embedly at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at https://github.com/jwieland/embedly-perl/issues. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc WebService::Embedly

You can also look for information at:

• View source / report bugs

  https://github.com/jwieland/embedly-perl

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2012 Jason Wieland and 12engines LLC

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.

cpanm WebService::Embedly

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install WebService::Embedly