Yahoo hosted 24-hour 'hacking' event in India's tech hub

Global search engine Yahoo hosted a non-stop 24-hour "hacking" event on Saturday noon in this tech hub where about 300 whiz-kids used its web tools and services to develop new applications, a company official said Friday.

"About 300 developers across India participated in the 24-hour hacking event, which involved using our web tools, services and application programming interfaces (APIs) to innovate new solutions for our global netizens," Yahoo India Research and Development Head Shouvick Mukherjee said.
Being held for the third consecutive year, the "Open Hack Day" aimed at nurturing the open innovation ecosystem in India and drive domain expertise in the internet space.

"Open Hack Days enable talented developers to create better, more relevant and more social experiences on our network. The spirit is to leverage our open APIs and developer tools to create newer applications," Mukherjee said.

Clarifying that the web portal's hacking concept was different from the popular perception of gaining illegal entry into computers and network resources with a malicious intent, Mukherjee said the developers would get a lifetime opportunity to play with Yahoo! Query Language (YQL).

"Our type of hackers will use the YQL to create and use their own table definitions, enabling the language to bind to any data source through the SQL-like syntax and fetch data," Mukherjee noted.

The language platform also enables developers to query, filter, update and combine data across the web.

Developers can also write new applications using the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) in an open, self service web applications environment.

"Participants allowed to write applications front-end in HTML (hyper text markup language, CSS (cascading styling sheets), Java Script and in the language of their choice," Mukherjee pointed out.

With YAP, a developer can get in front of the largest daily audience on the web.

Yahoo began Hack Days as an internal event 12 years ago to bring its developers together and expanded into regular events in its offices the world over.

The annual event was also held in Sunnyvale in the U.S., London, Brazil and Taiwan during the last decade.