Why REST APIs exist - See It in Action

Understanding Why REST APIs Exist

📖 Scenario: Imagine you want to build a simple app that shows weather information from different cities. To get this data, your app needs to talk to a server that stores weather details. REST APIs help your app and the server communicate smoothly.

🎯 Goal: Learn why REST APIs exist by creating a simple example that shows how a client can request data from a server using REST principles.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a simple data structure to hold weather information

Set up a configuration variable for the city to look up

Write a function that simulates a REST API call to get weather data for the city

Print the weather information for the chosen city

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

REST APIs are used everywhere to let apps and websites talk to servers and get data like weather, news, or user info.

💼 Career

Understanding REST APIs is key for software developers, web developers, and anyone working with modern apps that need to share data.

1

Create the weather data dictionary

Create a dictionary called weather_data with these exact entries: 'New York': 'Sunny', 'London': 'Cloudy', 'Tokyo': 'Rainy'

Rest API

# Create the weather_data dictionary with city names and weather
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with city names as keys and weather descriptions as values.

2

Set the city to look up

Create a variable called city and set it to the string 'London'

Rest API

weather_data = {'New York': 'Sunny', 'London': 'Cloudy', 'Tokyo': 'Rainy'}
# Set the city variable to 'London'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'London' to the variable city.

3

Write a function to simulate a REST API call

Define a function called get_weather that takes a parameter city_name and returns the weather from weather_data for that city using weather_data.get(city_name, 'No data')

Rest API

weather_data = {'New York': 'Sunny', 'London': 'Cloudy', 'Tokyo': 'Rainy'}
city = 'London'
# Define get_weather(city_name) function
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the dictionary's get method to safely get the weather or return 'No data' if the city is not found.

4

Print the weather for the chosen city

Write a print statement that shows the text "Weather in {city}: {weather}" where weather is the result of calling get_weather(city)

Rest API

weather_data = {'New York': 'Sunny', 'London': 'Cloudy', 'Tokyo': 'Rainy'}
city = 'London'
def get_weather(city_name):
    return weather_data.get(city_name, 'No data')
# Print the weather for the city
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call get_weather with city and use an f-string to print the message.