In this article we will discuss what an API is, what it means to be RESTful, and how to implement these using Node.js. The Node.js packages we will be using will be Express for our API endpoints and Sequelize to query our database.
Learning how to create an API is a delicate process. Developers just want to build endpoints fast, so they can quickly get something ready for a webpage to consume. However, learning how to make things RESTful will make your API more consistent, predictable, and scalable.
This article is assuming you know how to create an Express server and connect to a database with Sequelize.
Terminology
Let’s define what it means to build a RESTful API.
Creating an API (Application Programming Interface) is how we can setup logical actions to perform certain functions in our application. For example, we can setup a function called Create Customer and that will provide us an interface, so we don’t have to understand how it will actually create the customer, all we need to know is how to call the function. It’s then up to the programmer to implement the requirements for the API.
Creating a RESTful (REpresentation State Transfer) API means we will follow a pattern of how to logically setup endpoints by using HTTP methods. For example, when you type in your browser to go to a webpage it will call the HTTP GET method to retrieve the webpage for display. We will discuss later all the methods we need to know to create our RESTful API.
Getting Started
Before we start, let’s plan out what is required in order to build our API. For example, let’s say we have a React application that has a customer page. On this page the user can create, show all, update, and delete customers. The React application will then make API calls to our Express server, and in turn the API will perform the action on our database. We will also need to prefix our API endpoints with a version number (This is useful if you need to build more APIs but need to maintain older versions).
#javascript #expressjs #web-development #nodejs #restful api
