Now that you know what you will create and what the prerequisites are, it's time to starting building your application. Also referred to as RESTful web services, RESTful APIs are based on the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) approach, an architectural style that enables developers to manipulate data.įor more information, check the following resources: If you don't know what RESTful APIs are or what this term stands for, take a look at this brief definition and explanation of RESTful APIs:Ī RESTful API is an Application Programming Interface (API) that uses HTTP verbs like GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to operate data.

The resources, in this case, will represent ads (as in products or services being advertised) that users will create, retrieve, update, and delete. The API that you will build will allow clients (third-party applications) to issue requests to manipulate resources. What You Will BuildĪs mentioned before, in this article, you will start from scratch (i.e., from an empty directory), then you will go through all the steps needed to build a secure RESTful API. If you don't have these, please, follow the instructions over here. Other than that, you will need to have Node.js and NPM installed in your machine. Although it would be ideal to know a bit about Node.js, you will see that the code and the concepts explained in this article are not complex. If you do have previous experience with JavaScript, but you haven't used Node.js, don't worry, you won't have a hard time here. If you have never used JavaScript before (even for frontend development), you might not understand the article well and it might make sense to learn about it first. To follow along with this article, you will need to have prior knowledge around JavaScript.

Node and express