As stated. I am using ruby to perform my task. I am to create a webpage that takes in user input and makes calls using the API back and forth. However, I am yet to understand how to deal with these APIs...
When you consume the API you are essentially making use of the service. So you are sending data and are, potentially, getting something back.
When you write a rest client, you are essentially writing an entity which will consume the API. The rest client could also provide some functionality to ease the consumption of the API, for instance if your API requires a time stamp, the rest client could automatically provide the current time stamp, or else provide the user with a nice UI control to do so easily, rather than type something like this: 22-10-2002 12:10:11 GMT.
The client itself can take different forms. It could be a simple page on a web page, or a more complex desktop or mobile application.
Related
Around a year ago I made an iOS application that finds restaurants near your location of any type and displays information about them. I made a web service call using the FourSquare api to get all the data which was returned in json format and then I parsed it and displayed the information on the UI of the app. Now I want to make an android application using Xamarin.Android since I am learning working with Xamarin studios and C#. When I make a Xamarin.Android application and go to packages then add packages I see there is a Foursquare api package that has a .NET wrapper around it. Here is the website url:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Foursquare.Api/
So my question is how does this work? Does adding this package mean I don't have to make a web serivce call anymore, instead all the data is stored inside this package and I just have to get all the data the same way I get information from a local database? What are the advantages of using this package instead of just making a web service call to Foursquare?
Think of it this way:
This Foursquare API is simply a .NET wrapper of the web service that you want to use. Thus, somebody has gone ahead and done all of the hard work for you so you can simply consume the returned data in your applications.
What does this mean for you?
Well it means that you don't have to write any REST consumption code and you can focus more on the actual application and any business logic that you need to implement based on the Foursquare objects.
To not confuse any further, this data would come the same way as if you wrote your own web service to access the data from the Foursquare API endpoint.
Advantages:
Already written for you
You don't need to know your way around their REST API
Usually follows best practices per language so it's easy to consume (Objects created, methods, etc)
Disadvantages:
REST endpoint might be updated and not reflect in the package until it's updated
Any bugs/issues in the framework can be hard to workaround if the project is not open source
Could be a lack of documentation on how to use the wrapper
I'm looking into Volt as an option for building an Admin interface to our REST API. The API is a separate application. I would like the Admin application to persist data to the API but also store it's own data that is irrelevant to the API (such as admin users and notes on the API data objects) locally.
Is there a way to sync each local change in the Admin with our remote API, like a callback, for example? Or do I need to wait until the Data Provider API is ready as mentioned in the most recent Volt blog post (as of writing)?
So this is a fairly common thing, so I think long term the solution will be to support multiple stores in an app and have a REST data provider that you can extend. However that might be a while before that's ready. In the mean time, you can always load and save data via tasks. (I realize its not ideal, but it will work right now) Let me know if you need more info on using tasks to load and save. I'll add the REST data provider to the TODO list.
I'm working on a web application that need to expose Json API for external apps and I'm planning to do an API centric architecture.
So basicly, the app will juste contains view/controllers for the web interface. the controllers will use Route::dispatch to create a request to the api part of the site (another controller in a package, but in the same laravel installation), then parse the result, and create view accordingly.
So I'm wondering what are the drawbacks, performance wise, of using this sort of architecture?
If each controller is writing the logic to internally dispatch another request then I'd consider abstracting that away from the controller and in to your own dispatcher. I doubt there would be a huge performance overhead. The application (as far as I know) doesn't get booted twice so you don't have to worry about that.
The only thing you need to be aware of is the input for the main request being used. Something you should take into account inside your dispatcher. Refer to this answer for more information.
You can also read more on consuming your own API.
Do I need to send individual entity updates to WebAPI, or can I POST an array of them and send them all at once? It seems like a dumb question, but I can't find anything that says one way or another.
Brad has a blog post that talks about implementing batching support in Web API.
Also, Web API samples project on codeplex has a sample for doing batching in web API hosted on asp.net.
It seems like WEB API 2 has support for this
From the site (Web API Request Batching):
Request batching is a useful way of minimizing the number of messages
that are passed between the client and the server. This reduces
network traffic and provides a smoother, less chatty user interface.
This feature will enable Web API users to batch multiple HTTP requests
and send them as a single HTTP request.
There are a number of samples for different scenarios on this page.
https://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Web+API+Request+Batching
You will have to create an action that accepts a collection of items.
If all you have is an action that accepts a single item than you need to send separate requests.
With batching always think about how you would report the failures and whether a failing of a single item should invalidate the whole batch.
I am trying to make a web app using ExpressJS and Coffeescript that pulls data from Amazon, LastFM, and Bing's web API's.
Users can request data such as the prices for a specific album from a specific band, upcoming concert times and locations for a band, etc... stuff like that.
My question is: should I make these API calls client-side using jQuery and getJSON or should they be server-side? I've done client-side requests; how would I even make an API call from the server side?
I just want to know what the best practice is, and also if someone could point me in the right direction for making server-side API requests, that would be very helpful.
Thanks!
There's are two key considerations for this question:
Do calls incur any data access? Are the results just going to be written to the screen?
How & where do you plan to handle errors? How do you handle throttling?
Item #2 is really important here because web services go down all of the time for a whole host of reasons. Your calls to Bing, Amazon & Last FM will fail probably 1% or 0.1% of the time (based on my experiences here).
To make requests users server-side JS you probably want to take a look at the Request package on NPM.
It's often good to abstract away your storage and dependent services to isolate changes and offer a consolidated and consistent web api for your application. But sometimes, if you have a good hypermedia web api (RESTful responses link to other resources), you could reference a resource link from another service in the response from your service (ex: SO request could reference gravatar image/resource of user). There's no one size fits all - it depends on whether you want to encapsulate the dependency or integrate with it.
It might be beneficial to make the web-api requests from your service exposed via expressjs as your own web-apis.
Making http web-api requests is easy from node. Here's another SO post covering that:
HTTP GET Request in Node.js Express
well, the way you describe it I think you may want to fetch data from amazon, lastfm and so on, process it with node, save it in your database and provide your own api.
you can use node's http.request() to fetch the data and build your own rest api with express.js