reading-notes

REST

Who is Roy Fielding?
- author of the HTTP specification
Why don’t the techniques that we use today work well when we need to be able to talk to all of the machines in the world?
- Because they weren’t designed to be used like that. When Fielding and his colleagues started building the web, being able to talk to any machine anywhere in the world was a primary concern. But most of the techniques developers later used to get computers to talk to each other didn’t have those requirements. You just needed to talk to a small group of machines.
What is the HTTP protocol that Fielding and his friends created?
- is all about applying verbs to nouns. For instance, when you go to a web page, the browser does an HTTP GET on the URL you typed in and back comes a web page.
- Web pages usually have images, right? Those are separate resources. The web page just specifies the URLs to the images and the browser goes and does more GETs using the HTTP protocol on them until all the resources are obtained and the web page is displayed. But the important thing here is that very different kinds of nouns can be treated the same. Whether the noun is an image, text, video, an mp3, a slideshow, whatever. I can GET all of those things the same way given a URL
What does a GET do?
- Retrieves from a system
What does a POST do?
- Adds to a system
What does PUT do?
- replaces in a system
What does PATCH do?
- Appends/updates a current item

Did you get your API key?
- No, it requires a site URL and my address to get a key