API (Application Programming Interface)

omdb exposes all of its content via an open API. The API is currently in alpha state and only available on www.omdb-beta.org. omdb's API follows the principal of RESTful resources. This document is a reference for that functionality, and aims to serve as a documentation for developers building applications that fetches information from omdb.

REST (Representational State Transfer)

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding in 2000, one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification, and has come into widespread use in the networking community.

An important concept in REST is the existence of resources (sources of specific information), each of which can be referred to using a global identifier (a URI). In order to manipulate these resources, components of the network (clients and servers) communicate via a standardized interface (e.g. HTTP) and exchange representations of these resources (the actual documents conveying the information).

Resources

The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Everthing in omdb is designed to be a resource, whether its a person or a relation between a production company and a movie. The concepts and characteristics of each resource will be described on separate documents.

All resources respect the HTTP-Headers Accept and Accept-Language, see API:Requests for more information. All input must and all output will be UTF-8 encoded.

Sources

See Also