It’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, a RESTful API. This way, developers interested in using the API can just take a wrapper, include it in their projects, and start coding right away. No need to know this (relatively low-level) stuff; just use the API. The wrappers themselves are auto-generated from the API definition itself, but that’s another story ;)

Below there is a sample of the different ways I’ve found to do a network access to a remote server, using HTTP Basic Authentication and a couple of headers, in PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and even Objective-C! I’m even generating ActionScript 3.0 code, but I’m not a Flash coder :) So I’ll post the wrappers that work best at the moment, and in the future I’ll include other examples, particularly for .NET, C++ and Java.

In all the cases below, there is a “request” function or method that takes an HTTP verb (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc), a URL (without the slash “/” at the beginning) and some parameter data, in the form of a dictionary. The function wraps the underlying libraries of each programming language, offering a simpler interface, and allowing for HTTP Basic Authentication (for HTTP Digest Authentication it would be much, much more complex!). There are synchronous (useful for server or command-line applications) and asynchronous versions (for GUI systems). Off to the code! Continue reading →