Hi, how are you doing? First of all, I hope all of you are doing well. Maybe it's a silly post but here I am.
I have some issues trying to understand how to build a "Basic API" with some community knowledge.
It's sounds weird but I don't have so many experience in BackEnd development and I would like to learn but I'm lost, so i want to get some help of what can I study for building something.
I have an Idea that I want it to code so... so... long time ago, that will help me in the process of building it.
My idea most of it, is to build an API for a Learning Managment System (cause my school use Moodle and it's quite weird and ugly).
Want to know from Dev.to what are the very basics... I know it's not like "Hey, help me to build this to Copy/Paste your code", no I think more like, give me some of your knowledge of what to Google to keep track of a good RoadMap and go for it. I know there's Docs, but i think you can learn very much from a people knowledge.
I read tons of RESTful API's articles and SOAP articles as well and it's not helpfull cause gets me more confused where to start. As well I don't like so much the idea of Tutorials in Node of API's cause it's like I said, "I don't want to steal code".
And from this Idea can have multiple ones to code. Like:
- CRUD DashBoard System
- Educational Platform
- Issue Tracker of Educational Platform
Maybe an Android App
What I start to use it's NodeJS + ExpressJS (not know if it's good already) and MongoDB for the FrontEnd I would use VueJS.
So if one of you would say "Hey here it's my api structure", see this link and could help you understand what to know before diving in to it. Build first a ToDo app.
If you get here, thanks cause I write this like 6 times and I don't know if i would delete this in some minutes.
If I don't see help, no problem, it's mostly to talk with someone...
Take care, keep coding the world it's nothing without you. :)
Top comments (5)
The first place to start is to determine what your database structure is going to be, and then use that to "design" your API.
Create a list of the basic crud endpoints that you think you'd need.
Since this is the first time you've done this, making use of api code generator tools could be helpful, like (OpenAPI)[swagger.io/tools/swagger-codegen/] , which is an industry-standard API format.
It will do all the heavy lifting for you and allow you to focus on designing your solution instead of the more mundane tasks of API building.
Once you have this ready, you can make adjustments as needed and work on connecting it to your front end. You can also work backwards from the code it generates to get a better idea of how it works!
Ohhh I'm going to dive in Swagger to see what's going behind the curtain 😉 thanks, Brandin
My pleasure. I think the OpenAPI moniker is used more frequently now though, so if you have a hard time finding content/examples, try using the other name!
I wrote an article on CodeTips, on How To create a CRUD API, using Node.js and Express, on Ubuntu 18.04 which may be what you're looking for.
Thanks, I'll give it a try 😄