Intro for Brothas and Sistas to Start Side Hustling with REST Calls
Building web-based is not the same animal as it was 5 or 10 years ago. We are already past coding HTML for web pages meant for desktops computer. To be honest, we are also beyond ASP.NET and PHP to generate web sites as that is considered old and outdated. Today we have mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones and these items have their own interface that let you tap, swipe and other form of gestures to interact with. So this article is for brothas and sistas to learn how to develop these kind of applications in today world, even on a cheap hosting account.
REST is How You Communicate With Servers using an URL
Many of you cats heard of the term cloud service and stuff like that but it is not a new technology, just a relatively new buzzword. In fact, the concept of cloud service is older than the Internet itself so just LOL at cats talking about the cloud like it is a new phenomenon, it isn’t. Well, here is the thing – you can use a cheap GoDaddy web hosting account as a cloud service if you know how to create the base framework which is where I’m going with this.
The way you want to design web sites is to use the web site as a way to send messages to it and expect a message return. This way, you create a web site that allows iPhone, Android and HTML5 web clients to send messages back and forth to it and you focus on building a client on the UI that knows how to communicate with it. This is how you should be developing cutting web sites and if you want to be taken seriously at someone in technology.
The type of messages you send back and forth is basically an URL address that the web site can parse and understand what it is getting. And the way you send the message is using the same way you would submit a web form through what is known as POST and GET directives. I’ve already demonstrated this in the geo-location code I wrote where I wrote code that passes a URL to an internal web service to calculate distance and determine if the current location is near a preset location to determine if a user is in vicinity.
The reason why I’m explaining this to you is because I want you to understand how to create next generation hustles off $5/month GoDaddy accounts and scale your hustle to real levels to not work full-time on the job and focus more on your hustle. In this example, let’s talk about the self-checkout model and how you would set that up with a $5/month GoDaddy account.
Self Check-Out Market Example
The photo above comes from Avanti, a company I covered before about their success in the self-checkout market business. So in the self-checkout market set-up, you offer food like a convenience store and have kiosks that allow people to make purchases. This beats vending machines because you can deliver fresh food every day to the job and they don’t have to eat all that artificial ingredients, sodium, sugar crap they have in those vending machines.
Some of you guys are sleeping not to chase this business model because I’m about to put out another article about Whole Food success and you don’t realize this self-checkout market setup is the equivalent of bringing the Whole Foods concept to the workplace. And it creates jobs and vendor opportunities for people in the community to supply the food and setup the machines.
See in this setup, you have the kiosk that will send messages to the web site account and here are the kind of messages:
www.marketshopninja.com/checkout.aspx?kiosk=aa33&user=3311&item=apple
This URL basically says that Kiosk AA33 that you got at some place with a registered user 3311 is adding an apple to the cart and you add this to your web hosting database. Then you return a message that show what is in the cart on the kiosk screen, like the grocery store self-checkout market.
Now here is the thing – you just made your life a lot easier programming for the iPhone, Android and even kiosks because all you doing is display text and letting the Web Site Hosting account do all of the calculations. All these devices have code that let you POST/GET an URL and get data back. If you set it up your hustle this way, cats can check out products using their smart phone and don’t even have to use the kiosk as cats can pay through their mobile phone for the item!
This is just the Beginning
I didn’t want to write a long article or put too much technical details out there but just give you an example of how REST Services work because this is the core of how you will be creating next generation web sites off these cheap hosting accounts. Let’s go into examples of the type of services you can create.
You can create kiosks that communicate with your web site to process payments. You can create premium services for example, deliver images or movies or music from a URL request to send back a media file to the mobile device – this is how many media streaming services work. You can create an online information database that other people use such as a listing of homes for sale and cats pay to access your database and display the results as listings on their web site. These are the type of hustles you can operate.
