Well first of all I think rolling out your own solution for this all you need is urllib2 or httplib2 . Anyways in case you do require a generic REST client check this out .
However i think the feature set of the library will not work for most web services because they shall probably using oauth etc .. . Also I don't like the fact that it is written over httplib which is a pain as compared to httplib2 still should work for you if you don't have to handle a lot of redirections etc ..
I would give the requests library a try for this. Essentially just a much easier to use wrapper around the standard library modules (i.e. urllib2, httplib2, etc.) you would use for the same thing. For example, to fetch json data from a url that requires basic authentication would look like this:
import requests
response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
auth=('user', 'password'))
data = response.json()
For kerberos authentication the requests project has the reqests-kerberos library which provides a kerberos authentication class that you can use with requests:
import requests
from requests_kerberos import HTTPKerberosAuth
response = requests.get('http://thedataishere.com',
auth=HTTPKerberosAuth())
data = response.json()
You basically need to make a HTTP request to the service, and then parse the body of the response. I like to use httplib2 for it:
import httplib2 as http
import json
try:
from urlparse import urlparse
except ImportError:
from urllib.parse import urlparse
headers = {
'Accept': 'application/json',
'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=UTF-8'
}
uri = 'http://yourservice.com'
path = '/path/to/resource/'
target = urlparse(uri+path)
method = 'GET'
body = ''
h = http.Http()
# If you need authentication some example:
if auth:
h.add_credentials(auth.user, auth.password)
response, content = h.request(
target.geturl(),
method,
body,
headers)
# assume that content is a json reply
# parse content with the json module
data = json.loads(content)
If you desire to use Python 3, you can use the following:
import json
import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request('url')
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as response:
result = json.loads(response.readall().decode('utf-8'))