API integration with Photoshop

Question

I have a basic idea of Photoshop scripting via Javascript..

I want to use data from http://www.wunderground.com (Api) in my photoshop script.

But have no idea how to request(access) these data.

Answer 1

I can do that sort of thing, but I am not sure how clunky it is - there could be an easier way I don't know - so we'll see if anyone else come up with something better.

First, find where your PHP is located, like this:

which php
/usr/local/bin/php

so I see mine is in /usr/local/bin/php. I need that for the first line of my PHP script.

Now make a stand-alone PHP script that accesses Wunderground's API. I do not have a key, so I have not actually called their API, rather I have commented out the calls and then faked the results. So I save this as /Users/Mark/tmp/wunderground.php

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
  // $json_string = file_get_contents("http://api.wunderground.com/api/Your_Key/geolookup/conditions/q/IA/Cedar_Rapids.json");
  // $parsed_json = json_decode($json_string);
  // $location = $parsed_json->{'location'}->{'city'};
  // $temp_f = $parsed_json->{'current_observation'}->{'temp_f'};
  // echo "Current temperature in ${location} is: ${temp_f}\n";
  echo "Current temperature in 36";
?>

I make that executable like this:

chmod +x /Users/Mark/tmp/wunderground.php

and run it like this:

/Users/Mark/tmp/wunderground.php
Current temperature is 36

This step MUST work before you bother doing anything else, and so I test it stand-alone here... looks good!

Now I write a Photoshop Actionscript/Javascript thingy and save it as <Photoshop>/Presets/Scripts/Test.jsx

alert("Hello world!")
app.system("/Users/Mark/tmp/wunderground.php > /Users/Mark/result.txt")
var w = new File("/Users/Mark/result.txt");
w.open('r');
var str = "";
while(!w.eof)
   str += w.readln();
w.close();   
alert(str);

You see that executes the PHP script on the second line and saves the result in a file which I then read and display the contents of in an alert().

So, I re-start Photoshop since editing my script (it only parses them at startup) and then I go in Photoshop to File->Scripts and chosse Test.jsx

Here is how it looks: