Web and Mobile Development - RESTful Calls

Activity Goals

The goals of this activity are:
  1. To explore Representational State Transfer (REST) as applied to HTTP web calls
  2. To articulate the basic RESTful operations and map those to HTTP standard verbs
  3. To identify arrays of objects, and elements within objects, of JSON structures

The Activity

Directions

Consider the activity models and answer the questions provided. First reflect on these questions on your own briefly, before discussing and comparing your thoughts with your group. Appoint one member of your group to take notes for the group, and appoint another member to discuss your findings with the class. After class, think about the questions in the reflective prompt and respond to those individually. Report out on areas of disagreement or items for which you and your group identified alternative approaches. Write down and report out questions you encountered along the way for group discussion.

Model 1: RESTful Resources

https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1299367852374450185

Questions

  1. What part of the URL represents the tweet ID?
  2. How do we know which user made that tweet?
  3. What CRUD verb do you think is executed on this URL (Create, Read, Update, Delete)?
  4. What HTTP verb do you think is executed (POST, PUT, DELETE)?
  5. What is the noun in this transaction?
  6. What changes in the URL if we want to get a different tweet from the same user?

Model 2: RESTful Exchanges

A RESTful Exchange Diagram

Questions

  1. Modify the program to print out the length of daylight (between sunrise and sunset) in hours, minutes, and seconds. Note that the sunrise and sunset times are given in Unix epoch time, which is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970.

Embedded Code Environment

You can try out some code examples in this embedded development environment! To share this with someone else, first have one member of your group make a small change to the file, then click "Open in Repl.it". Log into your Repl.it account (or create one if needed), and click the "Share" button at the top right. Note that some embedded Repl.it projects have multiple source files; you can see those by clicking the file icon on the left navigation bar of the embedded code frame. Share the link that opens up with your group members. Remember only to do this for partner/group activities!

Submission

Submit your answers to the questions using the Collaborative Spaces section of OneNote. You can add a page with your name and your group members' names, and today's date, as the title. Under the appropriate section (i.e., "Class Notes", "Collaborative Spaces", "Reflective Prompts") that you can select on the left side of the screen, you can click "Add Page" on the right side. You can answer any reflective prompt questions in the Reflective Journal section of your OneNote Classroom personal section.