Twitter/Facebook/Linked-in/Google Data, Oh My! Web API programming using Python

This talk will teach Python programmers how to build applications that fetch data from third-party websites like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, Google (gmail, contacts), or any other site that exposes a (Restful) Web API. The talk will cover the basics, including signing up for developer access, authentication using OAuth, using the APIs directly via HTTP calls, overviews of a few selected third-party libraries for accessing popular websites, and finally how to incorporate this into a web based application - with django as a specific example.

This is the outline of the talk:

• Getting Started
  • Understanding OAuth Authentication: OAuth1 (Twitter), OAuth2 (Facebook)
  • Signing up as a developer to get access
  • Basic access using oauth2
• Anatomy of an API Call
  • Understanding Requests and Parameters
  • Parsing JSON and XML results
  • GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
• Getting things done
  • Examples of interesting data access using just oauth2+httplib2
  • Quick overviews of a few popular libraries for accessing facebook, twitter
  • Overview of incorporating this into a web app
  • Walkthrough of a facebook app using django

Navin is a software professional (architect/developer) with 15+ years of Industry experience, the last 4 years of which has been almost exclusively in Python. Navin is currently the CTO at BharatHealth.com, a web-based SaaS software company that does it's development in Python. Before that he's worked in Symantec Software (previously Veritas), Quiq.com (a dotcom startup), Teradata. He has a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT-Bombay.

For a detailed profile, see http://punetech.com/navin