Implementation of web systems

This week's blog features content from Geeksforgeeks, a site that features 20000+ Programming Questions, 40,000+ Articles, and interview experiences of top companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Adobe, Flipkart, etc
 
Web systems are systems that use internet technologies to deliver information and services. Deliveries might include textual data, multimedia or any other format. There are various ways web systems can be packaged and delivered to users, for instance through websites, web apps and can be embedded into hardware as in internet of things frameworks.
 
For most users, their interaction with web systems is through websites. They are web pages that get served over the internet. A website can either be static or dynamic. Static websites simply deliver data and information and do not perform requests to a backend service. What you see is what you get. On the other hand, dynamic websites will change state based on the user’s interaction with it. Requests are sent to a backend service that returns data and changes the state of the site whereby a user gets to see a different view based on their interaction.
 
Web development can start by building the application from scratch or using a framework that provides a boilerplate (sample code) to start from. There component of web development includes web design, web publishing, web programming, and database management. Frameworks include, AngularJS, ReactJS, VueJS, Laravel etc. There are two sides to bringing a web system to life, the front-end development, and the backend development. Front-end also known as the client side is that part that the user directly interacts with. It could be buttons, lists, cards, or multimedia component. Front-end technologies include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, JQuery and many more. The challenge associated with front end development is that the tools and techniques used to create the front end of a website change constantly and so the developer needs to constantly be aware of how the field is developing.
 
Backend development is that part of the web system that users cannot see. It receives requests, computes the request, stores (in some cases) and return the result to the front-end to display to the user. It includes writing APIS, creating libraries, and working with system components. Database services and algorithms for instance live on the backend side of a website. Technologies used include NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python etc.
 
We’ve used some of these technologies in class and seen their effectiveness and structure. In Thea Food Pantry web system for instance, VueJS is used as well as HML and CSS.
Sources:
1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-development/
2. https://frontendmasters.com/guides/front-end-handbook/2018/what-is-a-FD.html

REpresentational State Transfer - REST APIS

 For this blog I chose For this blog I chose https://restfulapi.net blog for its well descriptions of terms about Representational State Transfer and how it works. REST was coined by Roy Fielding in 2000. It is an architecture style for designing loosely coupled applications over the network, that is often used in the development of web services.

 

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. It’s the glue between an information provider and information user or a gateway between clients and resources on the web. Clients are users who want to access information from the web, while resources are information that different applications such as backend services provide to their clients. It could be presented in different format such as multimedia, images, videos, text, numbers or any other data type.

 

When a user makes a request via rest api, it transfers a representation of the state of the resource to the requester. The representation comes in several formats via HTTP: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), HTML, XML, XLT, Python or plain text. JSON is the most common format used due to its well readability by humans.

 

¹Headers and parameters are also important in the HTTP methods of a Restful API HTTP request as they contain important identifier information to the request’s metadata, authorization, uniform resource identifier (URI), caching, cookies etc.

 

²A REST api requires requests to contain components such as Unique resource identifiers, methods, HTTP headers, data and parameters. Some methods include GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. 

GET is used by clients to access resources that are located at a specified URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

POST is used by clients to send data to the server.

PUT is used by clients to update existing resources on the server.

DELETE is used to request to remove resources from the server.

 

HTTP Headers display the http method request or response that passes additional context and metadata about the request or response.

 

Data

Information that is passed into POST, PUT and other HTTP methods

Parameters in a request include path to specify URL, details, information about the resource.

 

³Below are 6 architectural constraints which make any web service a truly restful api:

1.    Uniform interface : 

2.    Client-server : Client applications and server applications much st be able to evolve separately without any dependency on each other.

3.    Stateless : The server will not store anything about the latest HTTP request the client made.

4.    Cacheable : For performance improvement, data can be temporarily be stored on client side

5.    Layered system : Data can be stored on server A, authentication on server B and accessed via server A

6.    Code on demand : Data can be XML or JSON format or executable code to support part of the application

 

Sources

1.    https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/restful-api/ accessed on 12/2/2022

2.    https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/restful-api/ accessed on 12/2/2022

3.    https://restfulapi.net/rest-architectural-constraints/ accessed on 12/2/2022