A dumb little wrapper around RESTful interfaces
This is a backwards incompatible change to move to requests
. It's still not
complete. See the open pull request.
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.
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.with_body(status="Hello from Dolt!").POST()
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.with_body(status="Hello from Dolt!").statuses.update()
This works for other HTTP methods as well, such as PUT
, DELETE
, and HEAD
.
You can use the Simpleton
class for simple requests.
api = Simpleton('http://api.example.com')
api.user.images()
# GET http://api.example.com/user/images
Dolt will automatically decode JSON if the response uses one of the JSON content-types and return a dict.
Dolt can also send JSON:
twitter = Twitter()
twitter.statuses.update.with_json(status="Hello from Dolt!").POST()
Dolt can send headers with the request:
api = Dolt()
api.foo.with_headers(Accept='text/html').GET()
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)
You can also use the add_basic_auth
helper:
from dolt.helpers import add_basic_auth
some_api = Dolt()
some_api = add_basic_auth(some_api, username, password)
Not all sections of a path can be represented directly as part of a string. You can use a dict-like syntax to add segments to the URL. For example, you can use the following:
from dolt.apis.couchdb import CouchDB
couch = CouchDB("awesome")
couch["_design/posts"]["_list/all"]()
That is equivalent to:
couch._design.posts._list.all()
When chainging attributes or using with_*
functions, Dolt returns a clone of
the current state. This allows you to safely re-use Dolt requests for batch
processing.
http = Http()
http.add_credentials("some_user", "secret")
some_api = Dolt(http=http)
update = some_api.collection.with_params(api_key=API_KEY).PUT
update.with_json(name='Foo')(id=123)
update.with_json(name='Bar')(id=345)
The Http
connection is re-used for each request along with the path parts
and params.
item = some_api.admin.item.with_params(api_key=API_KEY)
item[uid1].DELETE()
# DELETE /admin/item/<uid1>?api_key=<API_KEY>
item[uid2].comments.DELETE()
# DELETE /admin/item/<uid2>/comments?api_key=<API_KEY>
-
with_params(**params)
- Add/overwrite URL query parameters -
get_url(self, *paths, **params)
- Returns the URL for this requestpaths
- Additional URL path parts to add to the requestparams
- Additional query parameters to add to the request
Dolt's primary purpose is to make it easy to wrap other APIs, but there are a few extras that are included as part of the distribution.
In alphabetical order:
- bit.ly
- CouchDB
- Disqus
- GitHub
- Mosso/Rackspace Cloud
- Statsmix
All development happens on GitHub. Follow these simple steps to get your code added:
- Create something awesome -- make the code better, add a new API, whatever (this is the hardest part).
- Fork Dolt
- Create a topic branch to house your changes
- Get all of your commits in the new topic branch
- Submit a pull request.
- Offer to buy me a beer. :-)
- Or Make sure your pull request contains all of the relevant unit tests to verify your code with.
-
Install the
requirements/development.txt
file:pip install -r requirements/development.txt
-
run the tests:
cd Dolt/tests python unit_tests.py
As of v0.3, this work is licensed under the BSD.
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.