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Using RESTful APIs (babolabs.blogspot.com)

16 points by mekarpeles ↗ HN
I wrote a basic introduction to understanding HTTP and using RESTful APIs for people who are unsure how everything fits together. The format is not that of a research paper and is instead intended to serve as a basic primer for new programmers and startups interested in breaking into the world of RESTful APIs. Hope this is helpful and I look forward to corrections, criticisms, and feedback. Happy hacking.

7 comments

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pak
Anyone upvoting this, can you please explain why? This article has numerous issues that would make me hesitate to recommend it to anybody else.

I'm not going to list them all, but here's a start.

- gives the Google AJAX-ified query string without explaining the difference

- perpetuates the 256-char query string limit myth [1]

- totally muddles distinction between POST and GET, e.g., "Therefore, we POST information to a server when we want to give information to us."

- talks about examples that are never shown

- python examples have no error handling

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/get7#myths

johns
There is nothing about REST in this post.
bluesnowmonkey
#666 text on a #FFF background is unreadable. Why do people do this?
stanleydrew
This is about making an HTTP request and parsing the response in python. It has absolutely nothing to do with REST.
molecule
dang, another RESTful article that doesn't have anything to do w/, nor mention, Representational State Transfer.
mekarpeles
I can understand your confusion if you were expecting an article which discussed the fundamentals of RESTful interfaces and how it pertains to server client relationships. The intention of the article wasn't as much to introduce the concept of representational state transfer as much as it was, 'how can one use a RESTful API', hence the title, "Using RESTful APIs". I can appreciate that the introduction lacked adequate explanation of REST, itself -- and it's more than reasonable to expect an article on RESTful APIs to cover, well, RESTful APIs.

That said, I am thankful for your constructive criticisms and will revise my post so that its content is more satisfactory.

Pak, thank you for the w3 resource. As it says in the reference, it does seem that 256 was the limit for prior implementations; however, it seems my understanding was indeed based on outdated material. In response to your other criticism, which example is never shown so I may add it?

If you have suggestions on topics I should include or other resources I should review before making changes, suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers

pak
"I'll show a second example which does pass data along with the URL" ... never happens.

Also, when replying to people directly, try to thread your reply onto theirs or that person might never see it.