Using REST web services and JSON

Representational State Transfer (REST) web services use the REST-architectural style (for more information refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer). In the usual context of the HTTP(S) protocol, we have the GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods. These methods can be aligned with common operations on the data to create, request, update, or delete data items.

In a RESTful API, data items are identified by URIs such as http://example.com/resources or http://example.com/resources/item42. REST is not an official standard but is so widespread that we need to know about it. Web services often use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) (for more information refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON) to exchange data. In this format, data is written using the JavaScript notation. The notation is similar to the syntax for Python lists and dicts. In JSON, we can define arbitrarily complex data consisting of a combination of lists and dicts. To...