Consuming HTTP Services in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Consuming RESTful HTTP services
Lecture: Introducing the Talk Python blog service
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Now, one of the challenges of writing this course is
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if we are going to modify data out on the internet,
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we are probably going to need to create an account
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and do all sorts of stuff with various people's APIs
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and I know that those APIs might change over time
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and I don't necessarily want to ask everyone to go create a github API
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and the access key and maybe modify their own github data
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that might go terribly wrong somehow, I don't know how,
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but I just don't want to depend on these other services,
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and it's totally easy to find read only services out there
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that are publicly accessible without authentication.
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But, as we get into more complicated, more realistic interactions,
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we are going to need something we can binge on without that changing
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and without that ever becoming a problem.
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So I'd like to introduce you to the service that we are going to use
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for much of the rest of this course, now this service has at least three aspects to it,
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we have this blog API here and as you can guess,
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we are going to just model a blog but it could be anything right,
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the blog part is just something to make it concrete.
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Here is an http somewhat restful service and this is publicly accessible,
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so if I click this we get Json back, now we also have a restricted version,
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we are not going to talk about authentication now, that is its own section,
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but when we get to it, you are going to see that this service requires basic authentication
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and so we'll learn how to do that from Python, how to access that service.
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we have not entered, by the way, if you want to see what it looks like,
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there is username and password it looks like this one,
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it just won't let you access it without logging in.
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So down here I have outlined the various operations,
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like you can get all the post from the blog like this,
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you can you can get a particular blog post by going to api/blog/post id 7 or whatever,
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you can create a new blog post by doing an http post to /api/blog,
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you can update an existing post by doing a put to that blog's specific resource id
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or that url that goes to that blog and similarly you can delete it.
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Also we have a Soap service here,
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now we are going to leave the Soap stuff to its own section,
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just like we are authentication but the same service,
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the same set of services I guess we should call them, will do Soap,
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so if we click on here you can see all the crazy stuff,
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we'll talk about what that means later but you can see
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that there is a set of operations that we can work with
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here that are more Soap service like, they work in terms of nouns and actions,
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and they return rich objects as real objects, we'll come back to that so for now,
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what we are going to do is we are going to focus on api/blog and these operations.
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This is publicly accessible, consumer_services_api.talkpython.fm
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and you will be allowed without even logging in to modify the data here.
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It works in a pretty constraint way, so you can create some post
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and it won't be shared with other users,
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and they will expire after a little while, things like that.
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But this is a service that you can binge on and will use for much of the rest of this course.
