Chapter 14: HTTP Web Services

[joshuamabina]

Philosophically, I can describe HTTP web services in 12 words: exchanging data with remote servers using nothing but the operations of HTTP. - Mark Pilgrim

Source: https://diveintopython3.net/http-web-services.html

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Review Questions

1. In the words of the author, 304: Not Modified means *"same shit, different day." (a) Discuss what he means (b) Describe when the statement does not apply.

2. There are five (5) features that all HTTP clients should support. Briefly, help to describe.

3. Mark so boldly suggests that httplib2 is better than urllib. Expand based on guidelines below:

   1. Like urllib, httplib2 also returns bytes, not strings. Why?
   2. How does caching work on httplib2?
   3. How does httplib2 handle Last-Modified and ETag headers?
   4. How does httplib2 handle compression?
   5. How does httplib2 handle redirects?

External References

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Caching
2. https://web.dev/http-cache/
3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3586295/does-urllib2-urlopen-cache-stuff
4. https://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/
5. https://github.com/httplib2/httplib2/wiki/Examples-Python3