Yet another stallion in Google's stable is its YouTube Data API . In a nutshell, you can interact with anything from YouTube within your very own Java application! And even better news is that the API is under active development. A blog entry from 2 days ago , in the YouTube Developer API Blog , tells us about several new enhancements to the API.

As an introduction, below is some Java code that will print the titles of all videos on YouTube that have "lizards" in them, together with the authors of these videos.

Before you begin coding, just put this into your browser, and then you'll see the feed that you'll be accessing from code:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?start-index=1&max-results=25&vq=lizards&oi=spell

Right, and now let's get that from Java and, from that feed, get some interesting information:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
        YouTubeService myService = new YouTubeService("mycompany-myapp-1");
        String myFeed = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?start-index=1&max-results=25&vq=lizards&oi=spell";
        printVideoFeed(myService, myFeed);
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(YouTubeTest.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    } catch (ServiceException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(YouTubeTest.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
}

private static void printVideoFeed(YouTubeService service, String feedUrl) throws IOException, ServiceException {
    VideoFeed videoFeed = service.getFeed(new URL(feedUrl), VideoFeed.class);
    List<VideoEntry> allVideos = videoFeed.getEntries();
    Iterator<VideoEntry> itAllVideos = allVideos.iterator();
    while (itAllVideos.hasNext()){
        VideoEntry oneVideo  = itAllVideos.next();
        TextConstruct oneVideoTitle = oneVideo.getTitle();
        String oneVideoTitleText = oneVideoInfo.getPlainText();
        //Print titles of all videos:
        System.out.print(oneVideoTitleText);
        List<Person> allAuthors = oneVideo.getAuthors();
        Iterator<Person> itAllAuthors = allAuthors.iterator();
        while (itAllAuthors.hasNext()){
            Person oneAuthor = itAllAuthors.next();
            //Print authors of current title:
            System.out.print(" (by " + oneAuthor.getName() +")\n");
        }
    }
}

And here's the result (don't know how "Budweiser Compilation" got in there):

The JARs needed for this sample are:

• gdata-youtube-1.0.jar
• mail.jar
• gdata-core-1.0.jar
• gdata-media-1.0.jar
• gdata-client-1.0.jar

I don't know why mail.jar is needed, but errors are thrown if it isn't included. I had to download JavaMail especially for this purpose, which seems odd. Something else that's unclear is the argument to the YouTubeService class's constructor. The documentation says that the "argument to the constructor takes the form of a short string identifying your application, for logging purposes. This string should take the form 'companyName-applicationName-versionID'". Hmmm, "for logging purposes." Interesting. A bit like those sites where they say: "For logging purposes, please fill in your bank account number and secret password." In other words, seems like a slightly dodgy "phone home" thingummy that I'm not comfortable with. On the upside, in your code you get to use the "VideoEntry.isRacy" boolean, which is kinda fun.

One cool use case of this API is... integration with your IDE. For example, here is a toolbar in NetBeans IDE, with a list showing all the videos on YouTube that have "NetBeans" in the title:

Conceivably, the user would be able to click on an item in the list and then an external browser would open, displaying the video. Or, even better, the video could be played within the IDE. That should be possible to do too, somehow, I imagine, redirecting the YouTube video into a Swing container.

Thanks again Google for your cool APIs.