Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Request and response formats

From a purely technical/functional perspective, service implementations can be data- and format-agnostic. That is, there's no functional reason why a service cannot accept raw binary data input and return raw binary output. Data is data, after all. However, even in cases where a service really is concerned with data that isn't readily readable by human beings, there are advantages to formatting the incoming requests and outgoing responses, to afford some degree of human readability. At a minimum, it makes the debugging of requests and responses easier.

In that respect, request and response data share a lot of the concerns that were noted about the needs of configuration files, as follows:

• Being able to pass structured ...