Using json API pull to store in file or database - json

Question

I am trying to pull data from the justin.tv API and store the echo I get in the below code in to a database or a file to be included in the sidebar of website. I am not sure on how to do this. The example of what I am trying to achieve is the live streamers list on the sidebar of teamliquid.net. Which I have done but doing it the way I have done it slows the site way down because it does about 50 json requests every time the page loads. I just need to get this in to a cached file that updates every 60 seconds or so. Any ideas?
<?php
$json_file = file_get_contents("http://api.justin.tv/api/stream/list.json?channel=colcatz");
$json_array = json_decode($json_file, true);
if ($json_array[0]['name'] == 'live_user_colcatz') echo 'coL.CatZ Live<br>';
$json_file = file_get_contents("http://api.justin.tv/api/stream/list.json?channel=coldrewbie");
$json_array = json_decode($json_file, true);
if ($json_array[0]['name'] == 'live_user_coldrewbie') echo 'coL.drewbie Live<br>';
?>

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure how you would imagine this being cached, but the code below is an adaption of a block of code I've used in the past for some Twitter work. There are a few things that could probably be done better from a security perspective. Anyway, this gives you a generic way of grabbing the Feed, parsing through it, and then sending it to the database.
Warning: This assumes that there is a database connection already established within your own system.
(* Make sure you scroll to the bottom of the code window *)
/**
* Class SM
*
* Define a generic wrapper class with some system
* wide functionality. In this case we'll give it
* the ability to fetch a social media feed from
* another server for parsing and possibly caching.
*
*/
class SM {
private $api, $init, $url;
public function fetch_page_contents ($url) {
$init = curl_init();
try {
curl_setopt($init, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($init, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($init, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
} catch (Exception $e) {
error_log($e->getMessage());
}
$output = curl_exec($init);
curl_close($init);
return $output;
}
}
/**
* Class JustinTV
*
* Define a specific site wrapper for getting the
* timeline for a specific user from the JustinTV
* website. Optionally you can return the code as
* a JSON string or as a decoded PHP array with the
* $api_decode argument in the get_timeline function.
*
*/
class JustinTV extends SM {
private $timeline_document,
$api_user,
$api_format,
$api_url;
public function get_timeline ($api_user, $api_decode = 1, $api_format = 'json', $api_url = 'http://api.justin.tv/api/stream/list') {
$timeline_document = $api_url . '.' . $api_format . '?channel=' . $api_user;
$SM_init = new SM();
$decoded_json = json_decode($SM_init->fetch_page_contents($timeline_document));
// Make sure that our JSON is really JSON
if ($decoded_json === null && json_last_error() !== JSON_ERROR_NONE) {
error_log('Badly formed, dangerous, or altered JSON string detected. Exiting program.');
}
if ($api_decode == 1) {
return $decoded_json;
}
return $SM_init->fetch_page_contents($timeline_document);
}
}
/**
* Instantiation of the class
*
* Instantiate our JustinTV class, fetch a user timeline
* from JustinTV for the user colcatz. The loop through
* the results and enter each of the individual results
* into a database table called cache_sm_justintv.
*
*/
$SM_JustinTV = new JustinTV();
$user_timeline = $SM_JustinTV->get_timeline('colcatz');
foreach ($user_timeline AS $entry) {
// Here you could check whether the entry already exists in the system before you cache it, thus reducing duplicate ID's
$date = date('U');
$query = sprintf("INSERT INTO `cache_sm_justintv` (`id`, `cache_content`, `date`) VALUES (%d, '%s', )", $entry->id, $entry, $date);
$result = mysql_query($query);
// Do some other stuff and then close the MySQL Connection when your done
}