Building and Testing an API Wrapper in Python
I'm a web-focused developer with a passion for exploring new ideas and hopefully sharing more of them through this blog 😃
Most websites we use provide an HTTP API to enable developers to access their data from their own applications. For developers utilizing the API, this usually involves making some HTTP requests to the service, and using the responses in their applications. However, this may get tedious since you have to write HTTP requests for each API endpoint you intend to use. Furthermore, when a part of the API changes, you have to edit all the individual requests you have written.
An alternative approach would be to use a library in your language of choice that helps you abstract away the API’s implementation details. You would access the API through calling regular methods provided by the library, rather than constructing HTTP requests from scratch. These libraries also have the advantage of returning data as familiar data structures provided by the language, hence enabling idiomatic ways to access and manipulate this data.
In this tutorial, we are going to write a Python library to help us communicate with The Movie Database‘s API from Python code.
By the end of this tutorial, you will learn:
- How to create and test a custom library which communicates with a third-party API and
- How to use the custom library in a Python script.
Read the rest of the article on the Semaphore Blog.
