{"id":3264,"date":"2013-02-22T15:42:12","date_gmt":"2013-02-22T23:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/?p=3264"},"modified":"2013-03-08T12:53:19","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T20:53:19","slug":"the-restful-marketplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2013\/02\/22\/the-restful-marketplace\/","title":{"rendered":"The restful Marketplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the Firefox Marketplace<\/a> is being built, we are starting to make some fundamental changes in the way the Marketplace is constructed behind the scenes. In the beginning there was one big Django<\/a> site that served all the requests back to the users. <\/p>\n

Over the course of the last few months that has changed to being a smaller number of services that provide APIs to each other. We’ve got separate services for payments<\/a> (and this<\/a>), statistics<\/a> (and this<\/a>) and a new front end client<\/a> and plans for more. The main communication mechanism between them is going to be REST APIs.<\/p>\n

For REST APIs in Django we are currently using Tastypie<\/a>, which does a pretty good job of doing a lot of things you’d need. There are a few frustrations with Tastypie and going forward I’m extremely tempted by Cornice<\/a>, which we currently use for statistics.<\/p>\n

When you ask people about consuming REST APIs in Python, lots of people tell me “we just use requests<\/a>“. Requests is a great library for making HTTP calls, but when you are developing against a REST API having all the overhead of coping with HTTP is a bit much. Coping with client errors versus HTTP errors, understanding the error responses, scaling and failover and generally coping with an imperfect world.<\/p>\n

So we took slumber<\/a> and wrapped that in our our library called curling<\/a>. Curling is a wrapper that makes some assumptions about the server and the client. It provides us one entry point for all our REST APIs and a place to have consistency on the client side. Below I get a timestamp on a transaction using requests.<\/p>\n