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This looks like a really interesting project by Bruno Abrantes. I've built several API wrappers in Ruby over the past year and have long wanted to try to abstract out an "API wrapper framework" from what I've learned.

It seems like most APIs serve too small a niche to warrant building or using a fully custom client. On the other hand, making bare requests to an API seems like it could get messy if you plan on using more than a few endpoints. Blanket seems to fit snugly in between the two extremes. Looking forward to see where this goes.

#ruby #programming #api #api wrapper

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Web APIs & Net::HTTP

Introduction

Net::HTTP is a Ruby library we can turn to in order to send and receive HTTP requests and responses. To begin with, let's take a look at the API documentation.

Net::HTTP provides a rich library which can be used to build HTTP user-agents.

Net::HTTP is designed to work closely with URI. URI::HTTP#host, URI::HTTP#port and URI::HTTP#request_uri are designed to work with Net::HTTP.

For our purposes, a user agent means a client application or service that runs on our behalf. We can use Net::HTTP in order to communicate with a web API if by some tragedy a wrapper is not available.

To begin with, we should take note of the fact that Net::HTTP is designed to work with the URI module. In a nutshell, the URI module provides us with a simple way of parsing a URI string.

For example, when fed a URI / URL string, an URI object will expose a number of methods which can, among others, return the host, port, domain and relative path.

Communicating with a Web API

For a practical application of Net::HTTP, we will be interacting with the Saplo API. When browsing the documentation on their page, 3 things become apparent :

The API uses the RPC model. This basically means that we will be communicating exclusively with POST requests which will contain a method call embedded in the body.

There is no Ruby API wrapper or interface

The company is based in Sweden. Not that there's anything wrong with that :)

Our goal will be to get an authentication token from the API using the "auth.accesstoken" method. Let's begin by gathering the necessary libraries.

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Note that we have also included 'net/https'. The Saplo API makes use of both HTTP and HTTPS, and we will need the latter for the authentication process.

Line 4 : Here we have created our URI object

Line 5 : Set the port variable to the HTTPS standard of 443.

Line 6 : We have also created an instance of Net::HTTP - note that only the host and port are required at this stage.

Lines 7 through 10 : These are optional parameters that need to be set for HTTPS requests.

Line 11 : Instantiates a new Post request object, with a header indicating the content type, which in this case is JSON.

Now that our connection parameters are set, we can move ahead by formatting the body and send the request.

Line 2 : This is the call to the set_connection_parameters method which we looked at above

Line 3 : Here we set the request body. Note that the entire hash is converted to json. The instance variables @api_key and @secret_key refer to API keys which are declared elsewhere.

Line 4 : We are initiating the request using the "request" method of our Net::HTTP object

Line 5 : The response is parsed in order to retrieve the returned access token

Note that the response is returned as a string, which is subsequently parsed using the JSON module.

Et voilà, we have our authentication token in 8 "simple" steps!

There are shortcut methods available from Net::HTTP, and thankfully most common APIs already have well documented Ruby wrappers. However, I hope the above will be useful should you ever find yourself in the position to have to craft HTTP responses manually.

References & Resources :

Net::HTTP Cheat Sheet

Net::HTTPSession Class Documentation

#ruby #net::http #json #saplo #api wrapper #api