As you build out your application, scalability will start become an issue. You will find yourself making queries to the database every page load cost you precious cpu and load time. The trick is to cache frequently used data so that a database query is not necessary, reducing the overhead on your server.

Mozenda is a very powerful data scraping service. If you have ever found yourself writing scripts or manually copying and pasting data from one website to another then mozenda is for you. They have a very nice, full featured REST API which will be the focus of this article.

Envato recently released an API for thier various Marketplaces. I have taken the various methods of interacting with this data and compiled it into one, easy to use codeigniter library. It can also be used as a standalone php class if you wish. The class is currently PHP5 and requires you have json_encode, json_decode, and curl functions available.