On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 12:54 PM (WalzCraft) Jerry Forss
<JForss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ok, on to UPS.
Interesting. I haven't been following the rest of your story, if
indeed you've been posting it to this list. But I was playing around
with the UPS APIs using Python, and I have to say, by FAR the hardest
and most time-consuming part was getting all the authentication pieces
from UPS (i.e. asking for them and waiting for them; I think I also
had to talk to the person at our company who handles the exchange of
money between us and UPS). Actually programming the connection and
getting a response back on a test case was, I kid you not, maybe 5
minutes. 10 minutes tops.
Granted, I was already fluent in Python. But aside from setting up the
JSON request object (there are examples for that in the docs), there
were only a few lines to write. The code that actually sends the
request and receives the response is literally one line of code (on
your end; obviously there's a lot of library magic that you're
calling).
I'm not trying to discourage or disparage anyone from doing this with
RPG and HTTPAPI. Especially if you've already done it, or you're most
of the way there already.
But maybe for lurkers who are reading this, who haven't started down
the RPG/HTTPAPI path yet but who have Web API programming on their
horizon, I strongly, strongly recommend looking into Python or
Node.js, both of which are free and available for IBM i and make this
kind of thing stupidly easy.
John Y.
midrange.com
