Introduction

Mapbox web services are the lowest-level API available on the platform. Every other API and functionality provided by Mapbox, such as the JavaScript API or Mapbox.js, is based on services. It uses GET REST calls to fetch the data you require from Mapbox servers.

REST services are based on HTTP verbs to perform certain actions, such as reading, creating, updating, and deleting records. GET requests are used to read data from the server; PUT requests are used usually to update data; POST requests are used to create a new record; and DELETE requests are used to delete a record. The Mapbox API is a read-only one, so we only have access to GET requests to read data.

Mapbox supports both HTTP and HTTPS secure connections. When the REST call is invalid, the server responds with the relative HTTP error code and a message in plain text, not a JSON object as usual.

Access tokens

To get access to the services, we will need an access token. We discussed access tokens in Chapter 1, Introduction...