Web Services in APL: An Introduction to REST and OpenAPI
Pier Suite 1 (first floor)
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A RESTful web service enables different applications to exchange data and functionality over the internet using a standardised request/response model. OpenAPI is a machine-readable way to describe such services, and has become the unofficial standard for doing so – from a single specification, tools can automatically generate client code, documentation, and tests. Thousands of public web services publish OpenAPI specifications; this hands-on workshop shows you how you can easily build APL clients for any of them using Dyalog's OpenAPI tool.
No prior experience with REST or OpenAPI is assumed.
In this workshop, you will:
develop an understanding of REST and OpenAPI. An explanation of what makes a web service "RESTful" and how an OpenAPI specification describes one in a form that both humans and tools can read.
consume web services from APL. Using Dyalog's OpenAPI tool, you'll automatically generate an APL client from the OpenAPI specification of a public RESTful webservice and make real requests from an APL session.
provide OpenAPI-compatible web services from APL by building your own REST service using Jarvis together with Stark (a router for Jarvis that conveniently publishes its own OpenAPI specification) then exercise the service end-to-end, reading from and writing to it from a separate APL session using an automatically generated client.
After this workshop you should feel confident consuming third-party REST APIs from APL and exposing your own APL code as a web service that other tools and languages can consume.
Keywords: Web services, REST, OpenAPI, Stark, Jarvis