Understand ⏱ 11 min

RESTful APIs in 100 Seconds // Build an API from Scratch

What You Will Learn

Understand the basics of RESTful APIs and how they enable communication between computers
Learn how to build a RESTful API from scratch using Node.js and Express.js
Discover how to create different endpoints for your API and handle requests and responses

Key Concepts

RESTful APIs are an architectural style for designing networked applications, based on the idea of resources that are identified by URIs. A RESTful API organizes data entities or resources into unique URIs, allowing clients to access and manipulate them using HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE. The request message has a specific format, including an HTTP verb, headers, and a body, while the response message includes a status code, headers, and a body. Additionally, RESTful APIs are stateless, meaning that each request contains all the information necessary to complete the request, and the server does not store any information about the client.

Code Examples

app.get('/t-shirt', (req, res) => {
  // Handle GET request to /t-shirt endpoint
})

This code snippet defines a GET endpoint for the /t-shirt resource.

app.post('/t-shirt/:id', (req, res) => {
  // Handle POST request to /t-shirt/:id endpoint
})

This code snippet defines a POST endpoint for the /t-shirt/:id resource, where :id is a URL parameter.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, we learned about RESTful APIs and how they enable communication between computers. We saw how to build a RESTful API from scratch using Node.js and Express.js, and how to create different endpoints for our API. We also learned about the format of request and response messages, including HTTP verbs, headers, and bodies. Additionally, we discussed the importance of statelessness in RESTful APIs and how it leads to well-behaved web applications that are predictable and reliable. We used Express.js to build our API and handled requests and responses using callback functions. We also used a REST client like Insomnia to test our API and saw how to parse JSON data in the request body using middleware.

Practice Exercise

Create a new endpoint for your API that handles a GET request to /users and returns a JSON response with a list of user names. Use Express.js to define the endpoint and handle the request and response.

What Is Next

In the next lesson, we will explore more advanced concepts in building RESTful APIs, including authentication and authorization, error handling, and deployment to cloud platforms. We will also learn about tools like SwaggerHub and API Gateway that can help us document, secure, and monitor our APIs.

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