In this chapter you’ll learn how to write a self-contained program to generate a visualization based on data that it retrieves. Your program will use a web application programming interface (API) to automatically request specific information from a website rather than entire pages. It will then use that information to generate a visualization. Because programs written like this will always use current data to generate a visualization, even when that data might be rapidly changing, it will always be up to date.
TRY IT YOURSELF #1
17-1. Other Languages: Modify the API call in python_repos.py so it generates a chart showing the most popular projects in other languages. Try languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, C, Java, Perl, Haskell, and Go.
17-2. Active Discussions: Using the data from hn_submissions.py, make a bar chart showing the most active discussions currently happening on Hacker News. The height of each bar should correspond to the number of comments each submission has. The label for each bar should include the submission’s title, and each bar should act as a link to the discussion page for that submission.
17-3. Testing python_repos.py:
In python_repos.py, we printed the value of status_code to make sure
the API call was successful. Write a program called
test_python_repos.py, which uses unittest to assert that the value
of status_code is 200. Figure out some other assertions you can
make’for example, that the number of items returned is expected and that
the total number of repositories is greater than a certain amount.