“In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building application software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication between various software components”
In general, APIs define the rules that programmers must follow in order to interact with a programming language, a software library, or any other software tool. Lately though, the term API is most often used to describe a particular kind of web interface. These Web APIs are a set of rules for interacting with a webserver (such as a Salesforce server), with the most common use case being data retrieval. API’s provide mechanisms for CRM customers to access and manipulate data stored by the API provider (Salesforce in this example). The user makes a “request” to a Salesforce webserver, that webserver accesses a Salesforce database (with the customers data), and returns it to the requester in a “response”.
This same request/response cycle is used when you access webpages in your browser. The major difference between an “API request” and a “webpage request” is what kind of data is provided in the response. A website returns HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which work together with your browser to render a webpage. Web APIs respond with data in a raw format, not intended to be rendered by a browser into a user experience. JSON and XML are the most common formats used for this raw data, and they are both flexible text formats for storing data. Nearly all programming languages have libraries that can “parse” JSON and XML, making them friendly choices for developers. Most modern APIs favor JSON over XML.
- Load CSV File
- Manual Parsing
- HTML Canvas
- Chart.js
The Data Selfie App is a project tutorial by @joeyklee.
- What is node, npm, and express? Setting up a server to host static pages.
- Accessing GeoLocation with
navigator.geolocation. - What is a POST? Sending data to the server.
- What is a database? Saving data to NeDB.
- Retrieving data from NeDB with a "RESTian" route.
- Adding capture and images with p5.
- Next steps/exercise?
- Learn the basics of server-side programming with Node (and express?)
- Learn how to save data to a database with NedB.
- show just plain array
- show flat file
- introduce the idea of the database
- Learn how to use
fetch()to POST data to the server.
The Weather Here is a project tutorial by @joeyklee.
- Learn how to use
fetch()to grab data from APIs in node.js. - Learn how to store private API keys using environment variables.
- Learn how to deploy your project using services like Glitch and more.