Dolt

A dumb little wrapper around RESTful interfaces

What is Dolt?

Dolt is a minimalist wrapper around RESTful interfaces, specifically, JSON RESTful interfaces. Instead of adding another layer on top of the calls, this uses Httplib2 and some Python magic to allow truly simple wrappers on top of already well thought out (at least sometimes) REST APIs.

For example, let's look at the Twitter API call for grabbing a user. We'll use my user, tswicegood

http://twitter.com/users/show.json?screen_name=tswicegood

python-twitter maps that to:

twitter = twitter.Api()
twitter.GetUser("tswicegood")

So where'd this come from? The creators of python-twitter. You have to read their documentation to figure out what call to make, because the api docs don't mention GetUser anywhere.

Here's what that same call in the Twitter Dolt object as shown in the examples/ directory:

twitter = Twitter()
twitter.users.show(screen_name="tswicegood")

Notice the similarities? This way, you can use the official API docs to figure out how your'e supposed to interact with the object that represents it. No extra documentation needed.

How to handle non-GET methods

Dolt can handle all sorts of methods in its requests, not just GET method requests. To do that, you have to muddy up the API call just a bit.

Here's an example making a post to update the status. First, the Twitter API:

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Now the Dolt version:

twitter = Twitter()
twitter.statuses.update.POST(status="Hello from Dolt!")

Notice that all you need to add to it is the method you want to call. If you're feeling very Pythonic and want to be explicit in every call, you can add .GET as the final method call, though that's always assumed.

Sometimes having that POST or PUT at the end seems weird. You can stick the method wherever you want in the call string of properties, it just has to be in all uppercase. For example, this works just the same as the previous code:

twitter = Twitter()
twitter.POST.statuses.update(status="Hello from Dolt!")

This works for other HTTP methods as well, such as PUT, DELETE, and HEAD.

Handling authentication

Dolt relies on the httplib2 project for its underlying HTTP requests. Httplib2 has an add_credentials method that allows you to add credentials to it. Dolt takes an http parameter in its __init__ method which allows you to pass in an Http object with credentials. For example:

http = Http()
http.add_credentials("some_user", "secret")
some_api = Dolt(http=http)

License

This software is dual licensed under the GPLv3 and CDDL licenses. The CDDL is less viral than the GPLv3, but is incompatible with the GPL, thus the dual license.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so if you have questions about the licensing and how it effects your use, please consult a professional lawyer, not some random README file.

Want to help?

This is open source, so feel free to grab any of these tasks and contribute:

• Abstract away the simplejson.loads() call so you can replace it with your own functionality
• Once simplejson depedency is removed, add ability to return RemoteObjects