Year 2 - The internet of things

HTTP requests is a huge topic. This is as well, probably the thing you will need the most when dealing with the internet of things as this is the "raw material" which make all the value to your project.

To make things simple, HTTP requests are nothing more than requests, which are in general made to servers.

Imagine a restaurant, you want a drink, so you ask to the server, the server answers you (yes, no, I am busy which is translated in IT by 200, 400, 500).

In order to make those HTTP requests you will often use what we call APIs. The reason is the following one, you can download the full content of a web page, but as you just need a tiny part of it, it does not make sense to download it all, so to avoid this mess, website owners are creating what we call APIs.

APIs are systems which allow you to request only a subset of the data of the website. In order to not make those APIs accessible to all machines, they often use login systems which provide tokens that they sell or limit according to their internal policy.

In order to create your digital device, you are in fact making http request which correspond exactly to the API documentation they are providing you in order to extract just the data you need.

For example, let's imagine that you would like to create a connected device showing up the weather in Mexico city, then as you are not physically in Mexico city, you are using a third party service... so a server... which belong to a third party player, to which you are making requests in order to say "hey give me the time". Once it answers you then you get the data that you can play with.

The big challenge is then all the time to understand how the API is working as all APIs are different.