Connecting to APIs that use basic authentication

Basic authentication is a method of gaining access to a system by way of sending a username and password over HTTPS. While this is not the most secure authentication scheme, it is still used by some API developers and is very easy to implement.

In this example, I will show you how to write code to access an API that may have been created using basic authentication.

Getting ready

Typically, an API developer will provide you with a series of endpoints that represent commands such as log in, get user details, save details, and so on. These API calls will use either GET or POST/PUT commands, sent over HTTPS, to retrieve and send data to the server, for example http://myapi.com/users/login.

Typically, these will be accessed using GET or POST/PUT and will take parameters. In this case, they might be a username and password.

How to do it…

Create a new project in Appcelerator Studio and open the app.js file, removing all of the existing code. First, we...