Application Programming Interface: API and Web Services

Explore how apis and web services enable apps to consume data and abstract functionality, illustrated with a travel site's airline data requests and responses.

Explore how web services function as web-accessible APIs, enabling cross-language data exchange via http using xml or json and maintaining up-to-date data across apps.

Explore four types of web services: public, internal, partner, and composite APIs, with examples like weather apps, enterprise data sharing, and single-call multi-endpoint workflows.

Explore the HTTP start line, describing the requested action with methods like GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, including versioning and the CRUD operations.

Practice understanding the HTTP start line and core RESTful request methods—GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE—through an exercise with practice questions and solutions.

Develop fluency in the http status line and status codes through a practical exercise on restful APIs, identifying what 200, 100, 400, 300, and 500 mean.

Discover how http headers carry information in requests and responses to specify language and format without changing body. Learn headers: general, request, and response, with content type and status codes.

Explore the http body as the data carried in requests and responses. Learn how post/put/patch requests use bodies, and how json, xml, and html formats define api communications.

Explore the fundamentals of http, including its meaning, stateless transactions, request structure with the start line, headers, and body, and interpret common responses like 200 ok and json formats.

Explore postman, the industry standard API testing and design platform, used to design, explore, and debug APIs across HTTP, SOAP, REST, and web sockets; manage lifecycle, mock servers, and monitoring.

Install Postman on mac os by downloading the desktop app and moving it to the applications folder; Postman is an api platform for building and using APIs.

Explore how soap functions as a neutral web service and the simple object access protocol, operating over http or tcp with an envelope, header, and body.

Learn how XML enables human and machine readability for sending and receiving data over web services, using tagging and a lightweight structure, as shown with product examples.

Explore the soap message structure, including envelope, header, and body, and see how requests and responses use these elements with application data and a multiply example.

Explore live, public soap APIs using Postman, including multiply, subtract, and temperature conversions (Celsius to Fahrenheit and Fahrenheit to Celsius), with XML soap envelopes and real responses.

Learn JSON overview for restful APIs, including JavaScript object notation, a lightweight format for sending data between client and server, with objects, arrays, and example books with titles and authors.

Learn how rest requests and responses operate, using methods like get, post, put, patch, and delete, with endpoints, headers, and bodies, and interpret json responses and status codes.

Explore the restful apis exercise, including stateless requests that include all necessary information and the rest header with additional message attributes. Learn that status code 200 signifies success.

Master basic authentication, an HTTP header scheme using base64 encoding to transmit credentials for APIs and web services, which is vulnerable to replay attacks without HTTPS and session protections.

Explore how digest authentication uses MD5 hashing and a server nonce to protect credentials. Outline client-server flow with username, realm, password, method, and nonce, plus the pros and security caveats.

Learn how json web tokens enable secure, self-contained api authorization by signing header, payload, and signature with a secret, and using bearer tokens with claims like iss and exp.

This lecture explains OAuth 2.0 as an authorization protocol that uses access tokens and authorization codes to enable third-party apps to access APIs without sharing user credentials.

Learn how to create a restful API using Python and Flask, test endpoints with Postman, and implement CRUD operations (get, post, put, patch, delete) for a books resource.

Discover how Flask, a Python web micro framework, enables rapid, secure RESTful API development with a lightweight core, extensible design, scalability, and batteries-included tooling.

Learn how to check if you have Python installed using the terminal or command prompt on Mac and Windows, and follow steps to install Python.

Explore Python integrated development environments, their built-in source code editors, terminals, build automation tools, and debugging features that help developers begin quickly and catch bugs early.

Install the PyCharm community edition on Mac and Windows, set up a Python project, create and run files, and organize with directories while learning basic print statements.

Learn to create isolated Python virtual environments to manage project dependencies, install and update pip, and set up a Flask project with its own environment and activated dependencies.

Create and activate a Windows virtual environment for a Flask app, install Flask and Flask-RESTful, and run a simple API that returns 'Hello World' at localhost:5000.

Build a flask restful api to fetch a book's title and author by id, using a Book resource and a get method on the /books/<id> endpoint.

Fix a bug in the rest api by aborting non-existent book IDs with a 404 'book does not exist', and return the requested book when valid.

Create a delete function in the Books API that validates the book id, aborts if missing, and returns a 204 no content response. Verify the behavior with postman.

Learn to implement a put request in Flask RESTful by parsing title and author from JSON, replacing a book at a given ID, and returning the updated book.

Learn to implement a get all request by building a book list class and a get method that returns every book, tested via postman with /books.

Create a post request to add a new book by sending a json body, update the books list, and retrieve all or a specific book via a restful api.

This lecture demonstrates adding basic authentication to a Flask-based books API by creating a login_required decorator using wraps, request, and make_response, and testing with postman.

Thank you for taking the API and web services course and investing in yourself; stay in touch via email or Instagram for ongoing updates.