Posted October 11, 2011 at 1:06 am by Akshay
I feel like I have finally found the holy grail of true free access to near-realtime structured stock quotes of almost any symbol across the world. Fellow programmers in search of this for a while must be aware that Yahoo! Finance lets you download near-realtime quotes for many exchanges across the globe in CSV format. However, few are aware of YQL (Yahoo Query Language) – yet another beautiful service from Yahoo! that lets you convert CSV data to JSON or XML on the fly!
You fuse these two services and what you get is a pure free API which lets you access near-realtime stock quotes! You may use this YQL console as a starting point …and here’s how the output looks like in JSON …and here’s how it looks like in XML:
Hope this helps developers like me who may not have enterprise level access to expensive data, but have the will to create cool apps given this access.
Posted June 30, 2009 at 1:45 pm by Akshay
Did you know that Google has an officially supported JSON feed of search results? Google half-way cancelled their SOAP API a while ago, but they now offer a parametrized URL that returns a JSON data set. Google says this REST approach is useful for “Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments.” This may be even simpler to use than the SOAP API. Here’s an example query:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Paris%20Hilton
This URL format can also be adjusted to grab results from video search, book search and so on. While the URL has the word AJAX in the string and this is officially part of the Google AJAX Search API, this has nothing to do with AJAX per se, as the URL can be called from other environments, including the server side. All you need is a JSON library to parse the results (JSON means JavaScript Object Notation, though it also doesn’t require JavaScript). The Yahoo Search API already utilizes a similar approach, though it can return XML as well. The complete documentation of this Search API can be found on the Developer’s Guide of Google AJAX Search API hosted on Google Code
Posted June 24, 2009 at 7:56 pm by Akshay
Stock Exchanges around the world currently publish datafeeds in CSV format. This is quite portable and easy to implement, however it cannot be directly used in your web applications without server side code. Also these official feeds are generally very expensive and affordable only by enterprise level developers. Thats where Stock Market Data (SMD) API comes in place. This simple HTTP webservice presents a snapshot of the latest stock market data in various Web 2.0 formats such as JSON, RSS, ATOM, MDDL (Market Data Definition Language – XML for Market Data) or a good old CSV. Currently SMDAPI supports NASDAQ Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange, India (NSE) but we are actively working on supporting others soon.
Please note that SMD API is currently released as Beta and is quite unstable in nature. I am still experimenting with everything from the domain name of this service (smdapi.co.cc which is a temperory one) to the API structure itself. I am also very much open to ideas which I can incorporate in this project before it officially released.
Update: The API is currently no more supported in interest of this method I lately discovered. Please contact me at akshay[dot]raje[at]gmail.com if you need any help / consulting in this regard.
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Hi, My name is Akshay Raje. I am a self taught freelance web designer and developer. I love travel and am a great movie buff too. This blog is about my projects and experiments with web technologies. 
