nemetral.net | Insightful posts on design and code
In part 2, we saw how could be designed an XML-based API structure for fictitious website community.com allowing 3rd party developers to get access to members of a given age and living in a given city. The problem was: is it really a good idea to let every website or webapp design its own fancy API? It is now time to introduce the 3 main standard API structures: REST, XML-RPC and SOAP.
Last week we looked at web forms and we observed what was happening under the hood in terms of requests and data transferred; as an example, we tried to emulate a specific web form through a PHP script which sent a request to the web server and parsed the result to extract relevant information. The conclusion was: it's possible, but it's not clean. This week we'll see how transparent automation can be.
Say you need to upload a set of 100 pictures on Flickr everyday. Not so difficult: you login to your Flickr account and start to manually upload the pictures. After a few days though, you start to feel a bit weird about having to spend all this time to manually upload files at an era where computers, after all, are supposed to replace us for repetitive tasks. Say your daily sets of 100 files are prepared in advance: wouldn't it be great if your computer could upload them to Flickr on its own?
Nemetral is a freelance webdeveloper with 8+ years experience in the industry. On nemetral.net you will find insightful posts on design and code, tackling various topics related to webdevelopment from a highly educational perspective.
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