PyNoon Plus Lesson 2

Warm-Up Exercise

  • Pair up and share your Personal Python Project idea
  • What is the goal of your project - how will you know it has succeeded?
  • What parts of your project do you think will be the most difficult to implement?
  • Can you identify any skills you’ll need to learn to complete your project?
  • Is there any data you need to collect for your project?

Thanks

  • To the host for the great venue!
  • To our sponsors

Administrivia

  • Fire escapes
  • Toilets
  • Cleaning up after ourselves
  • Wi-Fi

Lunch Talk: Web APIs

  • On the World Wide Web, there are:
    • Applications used by humans (i.e. websites)
    • Applications used by other software
      • Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
  • Python can make requests to web APIs that:
    • Get data (e.g. get news updates)
    • Post data (e.g. publish a social media update)

Requests and Responses

  • HTTP is the protocol for web communication
  • HTTPS is the Secure version of HTTP

HTTP Requests

  • Every request has a method:
    • GET requests fetch data
    • POST requests submit data
  • Every request is made to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL):

HTTP Responses

  • Responses for web pages return text, images, etc.
  • Responses from APIs return data your code can use
    • Typically formatted as JSON or XML
  • Every HTTP response also has a status code:
    • 200 OK - The request succeeded
    • 404 Not Found - The path couldn’t be found
    • 400 Bad Request - Request parameters were invalid
    • 500 Internal Server Error - The server couldn’t respond properly

Tips for working with web APIs

  • An API should provide documentation of:
    • Supported paths and methods for requests
    • Supported parameters for each request
    • The format of data in responses
  • Meanings of methods and status codes are conventions - not all APIs use them consistently
  • Always check API terms & conditions
  • Some APIs require you to sign up for an API key or otherwise identify your account to make requests
  • You can even use Python to make your own web API to service requests from other applications!

Tutorial Objectives

  • Retrieving data from a web API

Independent Work/Homework

  1. Exercise Notebook:
  2. Work through the final futurecoder.io section:
    1. Tic Tac Toe Project
  3. Work on your own Python project