Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By : Malcolm Sherrington
Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By: Malcolm Sherrington

Overview of this book

Julia is a well-constructed programming language which was designed for fast execution speed by using just-in-time LLVM compilation techniques, thus eliminating the classic problem of performing analysis in one language and translating it for performance in a second. This book is a primer on Julia’s approach to a wide variety of topics such as scientific computing, statistics, machine learning, simulation, graphics, and distributed computing. Starting off with a refresher on installing and running Julia on different platforms, you’ll quickly get to grips with the core concepts and delve into a discussion on how to use Julia with various code editors and interactive development environments (IDEs). As you progress, you’ll see how data works through simple statistics and analytics and discover Julia's speed, its real strength, which makes it particularly useful in highly intensive computing tasks. You’ll also and observe how Julia can cooperate with external processes to enhance graphics and data visualization. Finally, you will explore metaprogramming and learn how it adds great power to the language and establish networking and distributed computing with Julia. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in using Julia as part of your existing skill set.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Interfacing with REST

REST refers to a software architecture style that’s designed to create scalable web services. It has gained widespread acceptance across the web as a simpler alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based web services.

RESTful systems typically communicate over hypertext transfer protocol with the same HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on) used by web browsers to retrieve web pages and send data to remote servers.

With the prevalence of web servers, many systems now feature REST APIs and can return plain text or structured information. A typical example of plain text might be a time-of-day service, but structured information is more common for complex requests as it contains meta-information to identify the various fields.

Historically, this was returned as XML, but recently, JSON has become more popular since this is more compact and ideal for the web, where bandwidth may be limited. As with XML, which we looked at earlier, the JSON representation...