Chapter 9Working with External Services

One of the most important skills a programmer can have is working with external services that provide data. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google, and so many others expose their data through APIs, which is short for application programming interfaces.

Your application makes a request to the API, and the API responds with some data, which you process in your app. It may come in as XML data or JSON data, or sometimes you’ll have to scrape results off the screen yourself.

Some APIs are freely available, but others require you to obtain access by registering as a developer. That adds some additional complexity to your programs because you’ll need to come up with a way to securely store the keys. Professional ...

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