#APIs in Web Development

[alycesutherland]

Progress:

Okay so the authentication for spotify is hard for me to understand and requires user authentication, then making a token request that while expire in an hour. So i focused on what I did know how to do and what I had access to token wise. The Spotify developer home page has a temporary access token for demos. I took that token and made a function to make get request to the API and two functions for top tracks and top artists. Then made some functions to print them in my terminal. Here is what my end product looked like in the terminal.

The data for tracks is proving to just show a years worth of listening even though I specified long_term in my get request.

Here is my code:

I tried just doing track.artist but Spotify handles that as multiple artists so I had to handle them as such.

Next Steps: Tackling the user authentication and token requests and including it in this code.

(Also yes I know that is a concerning amount of My Chemical Romance tracks. I had my MCR phase strike up again with a passion last October and I am still balls deep in it.)

[softwaredevelopmenthub25]

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[multidimensionalsock]

REST APIs

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a type of API where all the information needed to perform an action is passed to the API at the time the request needs fulfilling. The server does not need previous knowledge of the clients session in order to fulfill their request.

The alternative to this is that the client having a 'session' with the server, where the server keeps information on the client while it's active, which can take up a lot of server processing power and memory. For large services handling possible hundreds of thousands of clients at a time, keeping a 'connection' can take up a lot of server processing and memory.

REST speeds up processing time for both the server and client. With sessions, they can end up split over multiple servers, meaning servers have to communicate to get data which can slow down response time. Because the server needs no prior knowledge of a client, any client can handle any client's request easily, which also makes load balancing easier, a request can be sent to any server that can handle it which is currently the least busy.

All REST APIs use HTTP methods. A client sends a request via HTTP to a specific endpoint (location on the web), along with all of the information needed to complete that request. The server will then process it and send back a response.

Core features of REST:

Client-Server Architecture - a client that sends requests to a server, or set of servers via HTTP methods.

Stateless - client information is not stored between requests and each request is handled as separate and unconnected.

Cacheability - data that is expected to be accessed often can be cached (saved for a set amount of time) on the client or server side to make client and server interactions quicker.

Uniform interface - no matter where an endpoint is accessed from, its requests have a standard format. Information returned to a client should have enough information and self description that the client knows how to process it.

Layered system architecture - calls and responses can go through multiple intermediate layers, but both the client and server will assume they're communicating directly.

Code on demand (optional) - the server can send executable code to the client when requested to extend client functionality.

[codemerything]

Introduction to APIs and Web APIs

The illustration above is the best way you can think of how APIs work and I talk more about it in my new article about APIs. I really love the concept and logic of APIs, it proves that collaboration is a huge part of programming and APIs solidify that. I hope you enjoy the read and also this is my first article and I intend to write more about technologies that interest me and maybe tips and tricks in the future.

[anndcodes]

03/10/23

i finished shecodes week 5 homework, and now the app we're building has real-time temperature, as well as description of temperature, humidity and wind! you can search the city or you can get temperature of your current location!! this is really cool!

learning about api has being really exciting, so i made a simple page using meow-facts api where you click meow to get facts about cats, you can check the repository and the live page!

really excited to learn more about api!

ps: this sakura chocolate is the cutest thing! i almost didn't eat it 🥺

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[orbitwebtech]

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[guzscode]

Do You Want Some Cookies?

Doing the project-extrovert is being an interesting challenge. Since the scope of this project shrunk down a lot since the first idea, one of the main things I dropped is the use of a database, mostly to reduce any cost I would have with hosting one. So things like authentication needs to be fully client-side and/or client-stored. However, this is an application that doesn't rely on JavaScript, so how I can store in the client without it? Well, do you want some cookies?

Why Cookies

I never actually used cookies in one of my projects before, mostly because all of them used JavaScript (and a JS framework), so I could just store everything using the Web Storage API (mainly localstorage). But now, everything is server-driven, and any JavaScript that I will add to this project, is to enhance the experience, and shouldn't be necessary to use the application. So the only way to store something in the client, using the server, are Cookies.

TL;DR Of How Cookies Work

A cookie, in some sense or another, is just an HTTP Header that is sent every time the browser/client makes a request to the server. The server sends a Set-Cookie header on the first response, containing the value and optional "rules" for the cookie(s), which then the browser stores locally. After the cookie(s) is stored in the browser, on every subsequent request to the server, a Cookie header will be sent together, which then the server can read the values from.

Pretty much all websites use cookies some way or another, they're one of the first implementations of state/storage on the web, and every browser supports them pretty much. Also, fun note, because it was one of the first ways to know what user is accessing the website, it was also heavy abused by companies to track you on any website, the term "third-party cookie" comes from the fact that a cookie, without the proper rules or browser protection, can be [in summary] read from any server that the current websites calls. So things like advertising networks can set cookies on your browser to know and track your profile on the internet, without you even knowing or acknowledging. Nowadays, there are some regulations, primarily in Europe with the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), that's why nowadays you always see the "We use Cookies" pop-up in websites you visit, which I beg you to actually click "Decline" or "More options" and remove any cookie labeled "Non-essential".

Small Challenges and Workarounds

But returning to the topic, using this simple standard wasn't so easy as I thought. The code itself isn't that difficult, and thankfully Go has an incredible standard library for handling HTTP requests and responses. The most difficult part was working around limitations and some security concerns.

Cookie Limitations

The main limitation that I stumbled was trying to have structured data in a cookie. JSON is pretty much the standard for storing and transferring structured data on the web, so that was my first go-to. However, as you may know, cookies can't use any of these characters: ( ) < > @ , ; : \ " / [ ] ? = { }. And well, when a JSON file looks {"like":"this"}, you can think that using JSON is pretty much impossible. Go's http.SetCookie function automatically strips " from the cookie's value, and the other characters can go in the Set-Cookie header, but can cause problems.

On my first try, I just noticed about the stripping of the " character (and not the other characters), so I needed to find a workaround. And after some thinking, I started to try implementing my own data structure format, I'm learning Go, and this could be an opportunity to also understand how Go's JSON parsing and how mostly struct tags works and try to implement something similar.

My idea was to make something similar to JSON in one way or another, and I ended up with:

Which, for reference, in JSON would be:

This format is something very easy to implement, just using strings.Split does most of the job of extracting the values and strings.Join to "encode" the values back. Yes, this isn't a "production ready" format or anything like that, but it is hacky and just a small fix for small amounts of structured data.

Go's Struct Tags

Go has an interesting and, to be honest, very clever feature called Struct Tags, which are a simple way to add metadata to Structs. They are simple strings that are added to each field and can contain key-value data:

Said metadata can be used by things such the encoding/json package to transform said struct into a JSON object with the correct field names:

Without said tags, the output JSON would be:

This works both for encoding and decoding the data, so the package can correctly map the JSON field "access_token" to the struct field "Token".

And well, these tokens aren't limited or some sort of special syntax, any key-value pair can be added and accessed by the reflect package, something like this:

Learning this feature and the reflect package itself, empowered me to do a very simple encoding and decoding of the format where:

Can be transformed into:

And that's what I did, and the [basic] implementation source code just has 150 lines of code, not counting the test file to be sure it worked. It works, and now I can store structured data in cookies.

Legacy in Less Than 3 Weeks

And today, I found that I can just use url.PathEscape, and it escapes all ( ) < > @ , ; : \ " / [ ] ? = { } characters, so it can be used both in URLs and, surprise, cookie values. Not only that, but something like base64.URLEncoding would also work just fine. You live, and you learn y'know, that's what I love about engineering.

Security Concerns and Refactoring Everything

Another thing that was a limitation and mostly worry about me, is storing access tokens on cookies. A cookie by default isn't that secure, and can be easily accessed by JavaScript and browser extensions, there are ways to block and secure cookies, but even then, you can just open the developer tools of the browser and see them easily. Even though the only way to something malicious end up happening with these tokens are if the actual client end up being compromised, which means the user has bigger problems than just a social media token being leaked, it's better to try preventing these issues nonetheless (and learn something new as always).

The encryption and decryption part isn't so difficult, Go already provides packages for encryption under the crypto module. So I just implemented an encryption that cyphers a string based on a key environment variable, which I will change every month or so to improve security even more.

Doing this encryption on every endpoint would be repetitive, so adding a middleware would be a solution. I already made a small abstraction over the default Go's router (the DefaultMuxServer struct), which I'm going to be honest, wasn't the best abstraction, since it deviated a lot from Go's default HTTP package conventions. This deviation also would difficult the implementation of a generic middleware that I could use in any route or even any function that handles HTTP requests, a refactor was needed. Refactoring made me end up rewriting a lot of code and simplifying a lot of the code from the project. All routes now are structs that implement the http.Handler interface, so I can use them outside the application router and test them if needed; The router ends up being just a helper for having all routes in a struct, instead of multiple mux.HandleFunc calls in a function, and also handles adding middlewares to all routes; Middlewares end up being just a struct that can return a wrapped HandlerFunc function, which the router calls using a custom/wrapped implementation of the http.ResponseWriter interface, so middlewares can actually modify the content and headers of the response. The refactor had 1148 lines added, and 524 removed, and simplified a lot of the code.

For the encryption middleware, it encrypts all cookie values that are set in the Set-Cookie header, and decrypts any incoming cookie. Also, the encrypted result is encoded to base64, so it can safely be set in the Set-Cookie header after being cyphered.

---

And that's what I worked in around these last three days, today being the one where I actually used all this functionality and actually implemented the OAuth2 process, using an interface and a default implementation that I can easily reimplement for some special cases like Mastodon's OAuth process (since the token and OAuth application needs to be created on each instance separately). It's being interesting learning Go and trying to be more effective and implement things the way the language wants. Everything is being very simple nonetheless, just needing to align my mind with the language mostly.

It has been a while since I wrote one of these long posts, and I remembered why, it takes hours to do, but it's worth the work I would say. Unfortunately I can't write these every day, but hopefully they will become more common, so I can log better the process of working on the projects. Also, for the 2 persons that read this blog, give me some feedback! I really would like to know if there's anything I could improve in the writing, anything that ended up being confusing, or even how I could write the image description for the code snippets, I'm not sure how to make them more accessible for screen reader users.

Nevertheless, completing this project will also help to make these post, since the conversion for Markdown to Tumblr's NPF in the web editor sucks ass, and I know I can do it better.

[beproblemsolver]

Learn to create a REST API with Laravel and Postman in 9 straightforward steps. Follow our guide to efficiently build and test powerful APIs Read More: https://beproblemsolver.com/rest-api-with-laravel-and-postman/

[acemerotechnologies]

Acemero is a company that strives for excellence and is goal-oriented. We assist both businesses and individuals in developing mobile and web applications for their business.

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[alycesutherland]

First Steps:

So I want to learn how to get access to the spotify api and my data first in my terminal. So I want to:

Get my top albums in terminal

Get my top artists in terminal

Get my top songs in terminal

If I figure it out really quick:

Add that json data into an xbar project on my Macbook

If that is easy then I'll add more stuff for when you click on xbar

[alpinesoft-blog]

Transform Your Business with Custom Mobile Apps 🚀

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfLOrUiFZKQ Please like share & subscribe

[newsdataapi]

In today's world creating a website and application has become very easy with the use of APIs. With the APIs, you can integrate your website or applications with other sources. Here we have a list of Top Free APIs you can use in your APP development.