Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By : Pascal Bugnion
Book Image

Scala for Data Science

By: Pascal Bugnion

Overview of this book

Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language (it supports both object-oriented and functional programming) and scripting language used to build applications for the JVM. Languages such as R, Python, Java, and so on are mostly used for data science. It is particularly good at analyzing large sets of data without any significant impact on performance and thus Scala is being adopted by many developers and data scientists. Data scientists might be aware that building applications that are truly scalable is hard. Scala, with its powerful functional libraries for interacting with databases and building scalable frameworks will give you the tools to construct robust data pipelines. This book will introduce you to the libraries for ingesting, storing, manipulating, processing, and visualizing data in Scala. Packed with real-world examples and interesting data sets, this book will teach you to ingest data from flat files and web APIs and store it in a SQL or NoSQL database. It will show you how to design scalable architectures to process and modelling your data, starting from simple concurrency constructs such as parallel collections and futures, through to actor systems and Apache Spark. As well as Scala’s emphasis on functional structures and immutability, you will learn how to use the right parallel construct for the job at hand, minimizing development time without compromising scalability. Finally, you will learn how to build beautiful interactive visualizations using web frameworks. This book gives tutorials on some of the most common Scala libraries for data science, allowing you to quickly get up to speed with building data science and data engineering solutions.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Scala for Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Web APIs

Data scientists and data engineers get data from a variety of different sources. Often, data might come as CSV files or database dumps. Sometimes, we have to obtain the data through a web API.

An individual or organization sets up a web API to distribute data to programs over the Internet (or an internal network). Unlike websites, where the data is intended to be consumed by a web browser and shown to the user, the data provided by a web API is agnostic to the type of program querying it. Web servers serving HTML and web servers backing an API are queried in essentially the same way: through HTTP requests.

We have already seen an example of a web API in Chapter 4, Parallel Collections and Futures, where we queried the "Markit on demand" API for current stock prices. In this chapter, we will explore how to interact with web APIs in more detail; specifically, how to convert the data returned by the API to Scala objects and how to add additional information to the request...