HTTP Client

The gist: wrap the language you're learning's HTTP interface with a more friendly API.

Many programming languages come with libraries for making HTTP requests since it's such a common need for programmers. Sometimes the interfaces that the standard libraries provides aren't that intuitive.

Mock-Up

Let's look at what this could be like with Ruby. Ruby provides the net/http library for making HTTP requests.

You would use it like this to fetch the JSON from a URL and return it as a Hash in Ruby:

require 'net/http'
require 'json'
url = URI('https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M.json')
response_body = Net::HTTP.get(url)
res = JSON.parse(response_body)

res (truncated) is a Ruby Hash that looks like:

{
  "publishers"=>["Puffin"],
  "number_of_pages"=>96,
  "isbn_10"=>["0140328726"],
  "covers"=>[8739161],
  "key"=>"/books/OL7353617M",
  "authors"=>[{"key"=>"/authors/OL34184A"}],
  "ocaid"=>"fantasticmrfoxpu00roal",
  "contributions"=>["Tony Ross (Illustrator)"],
  "languages"=>[{"key"=>"/languages/eng"}]
}

Instead of repeating those three lines of code for every single request you want to make to get the parsed body, you could write a library for it.

Let's say the library is called Hyper, for the "Hyper" in HTTP. It might look like:

require 'net/http'
require 'json'

class Hyper
  def self.get(url)
    url = URI(url)
    response_body = Net::HTTP.get(url)
    JSON.parse(response_body)
  end
end

All you would have to do is:

Hyper.get('https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M.json')

To have the same output as before.

You'd then package that code up and share it as a library to use it in your various projects and for others to use.

This is a very simplified example, but I think it illustrates what this project could look like. A good library would validate the input, provide helpful errors, and allow specifying the needed options.

In the case of Ruby, if this was published as a Gem, people would install it in their Gemfile and use it throughout their code. Pretty neat!

Extra Credit

Add support for POST, PUT, and DELETE methods
Support specifying authentication headers
Raise errors when the HTTP response is not successful
Follow redirects
An HTTP library is quite nice. Something even neater would be a library that specifically makes making GraphQL requests easier since they're always to the same endpoint but the request body varies. Seems like a good case for a library!

Projectbook

HTTP Client

Mock-Up

Extra Credit

See Also