web apis

Web APIs

Teaching Materials

Teaching Slides | Labs

Introduction

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the "programmable web": the use of distributed web services to perform computation or to gather intelligence about the world. Examples include geolocation, distributed calculation and machine learning, search, and home automation.

Length

The taught section of this course introduces theory only; as such it should take maybe 45 minutes.

The exploratory section is lightly-structured to encourage students to discover APIs themselves and build their own projects. We introduce some project ideas and expect students to work in pairs or small groups to build a useful solution that they will then present to other students.

Learning aims

After completion of this course, the student should know and understand:

• The themes and concepts behind Web APIs and the programmable web
• Structured data using JSON
• The basics of RESTful APIs and their pythonic equivalents or wrappers
• How to discover web services using aggregation sites

Prerequisites

The student should have a familiarity with the Python language.

Further work