Tutorial Geolocation and Yahoo’s APIs to build a simple weather webapp

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Obtaining an Application Key

Yahoo provides a large collection of useful APIs that are free for developers to use. The requirement is that you register your application with through their developer dashboard. The registration is simple and straightforward, and as a result you obtain an application id (look for it under the title of your application). You are going to need this later in the tutorial, but first let’s see how everything would work together.

 

The Idea

Here is what we need to do in order to display our weather forecast:

• First we’ll use the Geolocation API supported by modern browsers. The API will prompt the user to authorize location access and will return a set of GPS coordinates;
• Next, we will issue a request to Yahoo’s PlaceFinder API, passing the above coordinates. This will give us the name of the city and country, and a woeid – a special ID used to identify the city in weather forecasts;
• Finally, we will issue a request to Yahoo’s Weather API with that woeid. This will give us current weather conditions, as well as a forecast for the rest of the current and the next day.