What You Should Know About Web Services and How to Work with REST APIs

In this session from the recently concluded Coding Boot Camp 2022, presenter Aubrey Pule Khoza will teach us how to work with REST APIs in Delphi. The session will help us better understand REST Web Services and what exactly they can be used for. Generally, REST or Representational State Transfer is a software architectural style that is created to provide guides or standards for web design and Windows app development. Those web APIs that comply with REST constraints are informally known as RESTful systems. A RESTful web service is implemented using HTTP and the principles of REST.

Understanding Web Services

You might have heard of Amazon Web Services or Google Web Services online. These aforementioned popular services provide cloud-computing platforms and APIs. These Web services are application blocks that can be published online and made available to the rest of the world for consumption. Generally, we consume these web services by using the operations that these companies provide. Interestingly, Delphi makes it easier to consume web services by automatically extracting web service information and creating classes and interfaces that you can use to consume web service methods.

To know exactly how these web services work, Aubrey will provide a series of examples. One of which is the web services provided by Last FM. To be more specific, the session will use the “getartist” web service that is made publicly available by Last FM. As the term suggests, this service allows us to get artist information from around the world. The presenter will create a sample application that is aptly named “Music Delphi” that uses the web service taken from Last FM. He will also demonstrate the codes behind the application and what each code does.

To learn more about web services, feel free to watch the video below.