Web Developers fetch a lot of data

If you’ve been doing web development for any length of time, you’re probably aware that a lot of our job revolves around data: reading data, writing data, manipulating data and displaying it in the browser in a way that makes sense.

And the vast majority of that data is supplied from REST API endpoints: representational state transfer application programming interfaces (what a mouth full 🥵, hence REST API). In laymen’s terms: the data we want exists in some other service or database, and our application queries that service to retrieve the data and use it as we see fit.

Now in the past, in order to test REST APIs before wiring up the UI to accept the data, typically you’d have to either query the API through a terminal’s command line, or use a GUI like Insomnia or Postman (which I actually compared in a previous blog post).

But now, if you use VS Code (and why wouldn’t you, it’s so nice to write code in!) life has just gotten simpler. No longer do we need to exit the IDE to test APIs, because now a plugin exists to do just that: REST Client.

The best part? Getting started with REST Client is incredibly simple, and I’m going to show you just how easy (and full featured) this plugin is, right here, right now.

Let’s get started.

#javascript #api #web-development #vscode #front-end-development