It has been a few weeks since I have posted and wanted to write about what I have been up to lately. I am currently still working on a OSINT project and wanted to talk about a website called the “Programming Historian”.
What is the Programming Historian?
I really enjoy this website because all tutorials are peer-reviewed and have a wide range of categories to select from, all centered around data science. If you like learning from data or telling stories with data you will really enjoy the Programming Historian.
What I learned from the Programming Historian
- What is an API
- API Structure
- Flask
What is an API?
API stands for application programming interface. An API has endpoints, developers make rest calls to endpoints and receive data in a response. The response data usually comes back as JSON or XML just depends on the API.
For my project I was making multiple rest calls and parsing through multiple response objects all structured differently, this became very overwhelming. Instead of dealing with multiple objects I wanted to deal with just one, so I decided to build my own API using flask.
What is Flask?
Flask is a web framework for building web applications and managing HTTP requests. Before building a REST Api with flask make sure you understand the below terms.
- HTTP — Hypertext Transfer Protocol — primary means of communicating data on the web.
- URL — Uniform Resource Locator — address for a resource, protocol, path are key terms you need to understand
- JSON — Java Script Object Notation — usually your response object will be in json. Things to look into JSON array and dictionaries.
- REST — Representational State Transfer
How does Routing work in Flask?
Flask uses a route() decorator on the app variable to tell Flask what URL should trigger the function.
How to render templates in Flask?
When a user visits an active route for you applications, a function is called which will return a render_template. For the function to return a template pass the name of the template to render_template().
Once I was able to figure out routing and how templates are rendered in flask everything else was pretty simple. If you are interested in learning please stay tune. In the next article I will explain how to setup a flask project and go into more detail about routing, rendering templates and passing variables to templates and much more.
Please checkout the below links
Resume website — https://tommarler.org
Linkedin — https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-m-bb4857112/
