Web and Mobile Development - RESTful Service Client

Activity Goals

The goals of this activity are:
  1. To explore Representational State Transfer (REST) as applied to HTTP web calls
  2. To use OAuth to enable user authentication when interacting with a RESTful web service

Supplemental Reading

Feel free to visit these resources for supplemental background reading material.

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 discuss your findings with the class, and the rest of the group should help that member prepare their response. Answer each question individually from the activity, and compare with your group to prepare for our whole-class discussion. After class, think about the questions in the reflective prompt and respond to those individually in your notebook. 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 Service Clients

Questions

  1. Using the tutorial above, write a program to support OAuth login to GitHub, writing a web service using express to capture the callback with the user's token. You can enter the repl.it URL into a new tab in your browser to load the page, and set that same URL as the callback URL (add /oauth-callback to the callback URL field on the GitHub application page).
  2. How could we use this token in place of a user account when developing our own web services? How could we associate a user with a token, while ensuring that subsequent tokens for the same user are also associated with that same user? In other words, how can we ensure that not just any valid GitHub user can masquerade as a user on our eventual service?

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

I encourage you to submit your answers to the questions (and ask your own questions!) using the Class Activity Questions discussion board. You may also respond to questions or comments made by others, or ask follow-up questions there. Answer any reflective prompt questions in the Reflective Journal section of your OneNote Classroom personal section. You can find the link to the class notebook on the syllabus.