HTTP Libraries – Your Best Friends

For a programmer like me, the web is a playground like no other. Not just the information that can be retrieved, but the sheer amount of services and APIs available online make getting structured, useful data a matter of reading a few documentation pages. From social data like Facebook and Twitter to data services like Xbox Music, the web is a repository of rich information that can be manipulated as per your whim.

So while the data is omnipresent on the web, the bigger task is pulling that data from the stores they reside in. This is where the HTTP protocol comes in. With its basic operations like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, you have a handy mechanism to retrieve, push or manipulate the data on the servers. Now, the HTTP protocol is not as simple a protocol as this blog post makes it seem. Things like HTTP Headers, application types, authentication tokens and other similar things make the task of HTTP based retrieval slightly more complex than it must have been intended to be.

This is where HTTP libraries come in. They handle the most of the heavy lifting and let you focus on the kind of content you are dealing with on a per API basis while abstracting away the inner complexities of packet and protocol rules. As someone who has been doing a lot of development in C# and Python, the HttpClient library in the .NET framework and Python’s Requests libraries have helped me unleash the raw power of the web countless times. To give you a glimpse of this power, you can take a look at how the HttpClient library handles various forms of HTTP content in this Stackoverflow answer.

The simplicity of Python’s requests library makes rapid prototyping with new web APIs a cinch. Simple methods like requests.get() and requests.post() (which do exactly as the names suggest) let you examine in real time the data coming in. This knowledge can then be leveraged to build more robust languages either in Python or in enterprise level languages like C#. The HttpClient library brings amazing power in terms of its ability to not only do various kinds of HTTP requests, such as upload images programmatically, but also manipulate headers and metadata effectively, thus helping you quickly get off the ground with your application. Add to that C#’s asynchronous operation support and you’ll be developing .NET software full-time.

Now while I learn Ruby, I have already exposed myself to the Net::Http library of Ruby to take advantage of this newly discovered ability. I personally will definitely make it a point to master the HTTP libraries of whatever language I use along with the defining features of the language. Accordingly, especially if you are a new programmer, I urge you to do the same and reward yourself with this power and flexibility to leverage existing information to build upon, create cool things and make the world a whole better place!

Eviva!