Head First HTML5 Programming

Chapter 6. Talking to The Web: Extroverted Apps

You’ve been sitting in your page for too long. It’s time to get out a little, to talk to web services, to gather data and to bring it all back so you can build better experiences mixing all that great data together. That’s a big part of writing modern HTML5 applications, but to do that you’ve got to know how to talk to web services. In this chapter we’re going to do just that, and incorporate some data from a real web service right in your page. And, after you’ve learned how to do that you’ll be able to reach out and touch any web service you want. We’ll even fill you in on the hippest new lingo you should use when talking to web services. So, come on, you’re going to use some more APIs, the communications APIs.

Mighty Gumball wants a Web app

This just in: Mighty Gumball, Inc., an innovative company that builds and deploys real gumball machines, has contacted us for some help. If you’re not up on them, they’ve recently network-enabled their gumball machines to track sales in near real time.

Note

You might remember them from our book Head First Design Patterns, when we helped them design their server-side code.

Now it almost goes without saying that Mighty Gumball are gumball experts, not software developers, and so they’d like our help building an app to help them monitor gumball sales.

Here’s what they sent over:

A little more background on ...