Captain Jack Sparrow on RESTful Web services

“I like it. Simple. Easy to remember.” The words of Captain Jack Sparrow. And this is exactly how I feel about RESTful API’s.

What is REST? The Wikipedia definition says:

“Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation on the web written in 2000 by Roy Fielding,^[1] one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification, and has come into widespread use in the networking community.”

Do not let this put you off or confuse you! Lets look at a RESTful implementation to make things clearer. Lets look at YouTube’s RESTful API.

Lets say you want to write a PHP or Python or some script that gets your account details on YouTube and display them on a page.

All you need to do is to go fetch the output of a certain page and parse that output to get it working:

You read in the URL given by YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/api2_rest?method=youtube.users.get_profile&

dev_id=YOUR_DEV_ID&user=YOUTUBE_USER_NAME

As you can see, this looks like a pretty standard link to a page in a site. Thats just it! It is! You can open this URL page in your browser. Obviously, YOUR_DEV_ID and YOUTUBE_USER_NAME should be replaced by the values you got from YouTube.

If all is ok, this “page” should return something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<ut_response status=”ok”>

<user_profile>

<first_name>YouTube</first_name>

<last_name>User</last_name>

<about_me>YouTube rocks!!</about_me>

<age>30</age>

<video_upload_count>7</video_upload_count>

…. and more ….

</user_profile>

</ut_response>

This looks just like XML, doesn’t it! Exactly. So you write your script to read the contents of the page that the given URL points to and parse this XML output it returns and do with it what you want to.

This is easily the easiest way of doing a web service you’ll come accross. Not only is it easy to consume the service, it is also easy to implement a web service this way!

Note, that there is a lot more to it. This is a simple, working example. I suggest you read all the Wikipedia page to get a better, more complete overview! You can however with this titbit of information, use the YouTube RESTful API!

technorati tags:RESTful, YouTube, API, webservices, REST

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3 Comments to "Captain Jack Sparrow on RESTful Web services"

• FeistyFemale | Blog Archive | Garden Route Geek Dinner - Accomodation Special said: On 06/19/2007 at 6:48 am

  [...] more information in the Geek Dinner, please feel free to contact Stii or myself or have a squize at the Geek Dinner [...]

• Standards.za.net » » REST? WTF? said: On 06/19/2007 at 9:19 am

  [...] just read an article titled Captain Jack Sparrow on RESTful Web services. Although I think the article is good in explaining the simplicity of web services to the masses, [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Muti API implemented in Afrigator said: On 02/08/2008 at 7:23 am

  [...] night Neville released a first draft of a REST API for Muti! POX, just as I like it… So I’m quite privileged and honoured to be one of the [...]

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