APIs

Question 1

What is an API

Answer 1

Application Programming Interface. It is the messenger that takes requests and tells a system what you want to do and returns the response

Question 2

What is Rest? or a Restful API

Answer 2

Representational State Transfer. REST determines how the API looks. It is a set of rules that developers follow when they create their API.

Question 3

What are the rules of Rest

Answer 3

One of these rules states that you should be able to get a piece of data (called a resource) when you link to a specific URL. Each URL is called a request while the data sent back to you is called a response.

Question 4

A request is made up of four things

Answer 4

The endpoint
The method
The headers
The data (or body)

Question 5

What is a root endpoint?

Answer 5

The root-endpoint is the starting point of the API you’re requesting from. The root-endpoint of Github’s API is https://api.github.com while the root-endpoint Twitter’s API is https://api.twitter.com.

Question 6

what is returned by API request ?

Answer 6

Most often ..A json object which looks:
{
  "property1": "value1",
  "property2": "value2",
  "property3": "value3"
}

Question 7

What are the request methods?

Answer 7

GET
POST
PUT
PATCH
DELETE

Question 8

What are the main http status codes

Answer 8

200+ means the request has succeeded.
300+ means the request is redirected to another URL
400+ means an error that originates from the client has occurred
500+ means an error that originates from the server has occurred