HTTP Programming and Web Authentication

This chapter introduces the urllib and requests modules for making requests and retrieving web resources. The third-party requests module is a very popular alternative to the urllib module; it has an elegant interface and a powerful feature set, and it is a great tool for streamlining HTTP workflows. Also, we cover HTTP authentication mechanisms and how we can manage them with the requests module. Finally, we cover how to implement OAuth clients and JWT for token generation in web applications with the requests-oauthlib and jwt modules.

This chapter will provide us with the foundation to become familiar with different alternatives within Python when we need to use a module that provides different functionality to make requests to a web service or a REST API.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Building an HTTP client with the urllib module
• Building an HTTP client with the requests module
• Authentication...