Getting Online Data

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Instruction

Getting Online Data via an API

Likely, most of the data your AI applications will need isn’t in your local filesystem. It’ll probably be online, and you’ll need some way to retrieve it. Most of the time, you’ll do this through an API.

What is an API?

API is short for Application Programming Interface. The simplest way to describe APIs is by analogy. Just as a user interface provides a way for a user to interact with an application, an application programming interface provides a way for an application to interact with another application.

Two Ways to use Online APIs

There are generally two ways to use online APIs:

REST APIs

REST is short for REpresentational State Transfer, an architectural style most web services and APIs use. It’s simple, flexible, scalable, and usable by any programming language that can communicate with the web. It can also be hard to describe to someone new to it.

REST Client Requests

REST clients access or manipulate resources using the methods built into the HTTP protocol, which are requests that a client sends to a server. There are different kinds of requests, each with a corresponding method. The requests that are most important for communicating with an API are:

A Simple REST Example

Pretend that example.com wasn’t just a special site maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force, for example, but a RESTful web service for the API of an e-commerce site. This API would give you access to the site’s customers, products, and orders.

Path Parameters vs. Query Parameters

The resource endpoint URLs in the above example use the path parameters, where the ID that uniquely identifies the resource is included as part of the URL path. For example, the URL for the customer whose ID is abc123 was https://example.com/customers/abc123.

REST Server Responses

The response provided by a server contains all kinds of information, including:

HTTP Status Codes

When your application receives a response from a server, it should first check the status code to determine whether it can proceed with the received data or take some error-correcting measure.
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