pyREST

pyREST is a half-complete REST interface module. It doesn't provide any specific interface to any specific service, or make any (many?) assumptions about what type of service you're accessing, beyond:

1. You're using JSON to send request bodies and receive responses
2. You want to use GET requests, unless you have a request body to send, in which case you want POST
3. You're willing to allow multiple values for the same key in a query string (e.g. test=1&test=2)

USAGE

Basic usage:

import pyrest

rest = pyrest.RestAPI()
response = rest.urlrequest("http://api.twitterest.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json")

response then contains a restresponse object with various properties you can inspect and access. If the request fails, a RestException is raised with (nearly) identical properties, including the original HTTPException.

The rest class also supports a default base URL, to avoid repeating common prefixes in client code. To use this functionality, you can use the urirequest method of the rest class.

import pyrest

rest = pyrest.RestAPI(baseurl="http://api.twitterest.com/1/")
response = rest.urirequest("statuses/public_timeline.json")

For the urirequest and urlrequest methods, you can pass a few parameters of interest:

• body - The HTTP request body (sent via POST if set); if this is a string, it will be sent as-is; otherwise, it will be converted to JSON or an exception thrown if that fails.
• query - A dictionary of key/value pairs to add to the URL. If a query string already exists in the URL, the two query strings will be merged by default (see qs_append)
• qs_append - a boolean, representing whether to append (actually merge) existing query strings with the query parameter, or if the existing query string should be overwritten.
• method - which HTTP method to use; unsupported (POST will be used if the body parameter is passed; otherwise GET is used)

TODO: Lots more to document; query and qs_append parameters to urirequest and urlrequest; maybe merge both into one function. Also, document the restresponse and RestException classes (pretty simple).