Introduction
Recently I’ve worked with a web API, the Cometdocs API, in order to use their converter of documents, particularly for automating some conversions from PDF documents to Excel spreadsheets for data extraction.
I wanted to use this API from my two favorite development platforms: Java and .Net/C#, so I needed to build what is called a language binding, i.e. a small library that acts as a proxy between the application code and the web API.
The development of these two bindings was really interesting from a technical point of view, and I’ve learned a bunch of things during the process.
I’d like to share the interesting stuff with you, it should be of interest even if you don’t have any plan for interacting with a web API because all the technologies and techniques I’ve used (the HTTP protocol, JSON data binding, SSL/TLS…) are applicable to other types of developments.