Delphi REST Clients Collection

Last Udpated on May 29th, 2009

This is the first page for my collection of Delphi REST Clients, partially introduced at DataRage in March 2009, and later demonstrated at the Delphi Live Conference in May in San Jose (CA). It is a set of different client applications for REST web services, all written in Delphi, using different techniques in terms of data access and data processing.

What follows in the initial part of the list. The second part is at page2. A separate example is my TweetOfTheDay program, available on http://www.wintech-italia.com/apps/tweetoftheday/.

For each example, you can see a short description, some rationale behind the demo, how to set it up (you need a developer account, for some of the demos), an image with the screen-shot, and you can find a link to the download file (a ZIP file with the complete source code and a ready-to-use executable file).

01: RssClient

This program gets the latest RSS feed from www.delphifeeds.com, loads it in a DOM, and extracts information from the DOM using XPath. The result is a list of blog entry titles and times. There is no need to set any password.

This program shows one of the most widespread uses of the REST approach, namely getting RSS feeds from thousands of bloggging sites, and blog aggregation sites (like DelphiFeeds).

Download: 01_RssClient.zip (412 KB).

02: AmazonBooks

This program retrieves books data from Amazon Store, loads it in a DOM, copies the resulting tree in a TreeView control. The edit box has the ASIN (or ISBN in case of books), and is preloaded with one of my books. The application use a generic Amazon trial account, with a limit on the numebr of requests.

This program demonstrates one of the first and large web services (and still one of the largest) ever deployed, which is the basis of the Amazon Store infrastructure. Documentation available on docs.amazonwebservices.com.

Download: 02_AmazonBooks.zip (573 KB).

03_GeoLocation

This program uses Google Geocoding service to retrieve the latitude and longitude of an address. Documentation at: code.google.com.

It uses as sample addresses the companies of the Customer.cds sample database that comes with Delphi (it uses a local copy, in the ZIp file). Some locations are not found. There is a sleep() call to avoid getting too fast of a rate (which will block che service). The data is returned in CSV format for easy parsing (using a StringList object).

The program requires a GeoLocation.ini file in the user's document folder, with the structure:

[googlemap]
devkey=

You have to fill it in with a devkey provided by Google. Signup is on code.google.com

Download: 03_GeoLocation.zip (573 KB).