Lab 11: Web APIs

Solutions

Lab Setup

• Find a partner
• Use CyberDuck to SFTP into one of your accounts on the cs.wellesley.edu server
• On the server, navigate to the cs111/Downloads folder
• Download the lab11 folder to your Desktop (by dragging and dropping it from the CyberDuck window)
• Open Canopy and load the lab11 folder in the Canopy File Browser pane

Web APIs Overview

Steps to generate a query-driven web page with results:

1. Using the requests module, make a request for data from a web API.
2. Convert the resulting data (a JSON string) into a dictionary, using the json module.
3. Study the data to understand how it's structured.
4. Iterate through the data to extract the information of interest.
5. Fill a HTML template with the extracted information (using jinja2).
6. View the resulting HTML page in a browser (using webbrowser).

Note: the HTML template files will render as web pages in the browser. To see the underlying HTML code, view the source code (in Chrome, View > Developer > View Source)

Table of Contents

• Lab 11 Home
• Part 1: Last.fm
• Part 2: Google Maps