Introduction to REST APIs

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Introduction to REST APIs Deeper understanding about REST APIs

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Clifford Ouma @clifford_ouma Who I am Postman Student Leader Moi University Clifford Ouma

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Agenda go.postman.co/build Recap intro to APIs? 1. Introduction to RESTful APIs 2. Building RESTful requests 3. Working with responses 4. Demo using HTTP requests 5. Conclusion 6.

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What’s an API?

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API? Application Programming Interface A P I

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Interface I Allow control of interaction with obstruction

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Interface I Allow control of interaction with obstruction UI is for users while API is for programmer

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Interface I Allow control of interaction with obstruction UI is for users while API is for programmer Allows programmer interact with data without worrying about implementation

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APIs Client Server

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There’s an API for everything Everything The Cat API OpenWeatherMap Twilio Discord Youtube-to-MP3 Spotify Twitter Facebook Google And so many more!

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More than 500,000 organizations & 13 Million developers use Postman 98% of Fortune 500 Organizations use Postman 65% of Global 2000 Organizations use Postman Postman is a collaborative API development platform that simplifies creating, using, and testing APIs with a UI What is Postman?

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Working APIs: Then and Now cURL Command Line Postman

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Let's talk about REST APIs

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Introduction to REST APIs R E S T State Representational Transfer

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Introduction to REST APIs REST defined a clear way of working with Web APIs

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Introduction to REST APIs REST defined a clear way of working with Web APIs APIs that use REST architecture are called RESTful APIs

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Requests and Responses

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Request-Response Pattern Client Server Request Response Resources Services Network API

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Making Requests Method (GET, POST, etc) Address/Endpoint (URL) Path The three ingredients to make a request: How we interact with the API

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Requests - Methods and Endpoints Method GET Retrieve information POST Send information PUT/PATCH Update information DELETE Delete information Bare minimum for a request

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Requests - Methods and Endpoints Method GET Retrieve information POST Send information PUT/PATCH Update information DELETE Delete information address of the server Bare minimum for a request https://www.google.com/search The scheme of the request. Defines how to communicate Host Path Protocol destination where request can be heard and executed

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Specifying Detail Parameters Start with ? and have key and value Query params and search params Building your requests

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Specifying Detail Parameters Start with ? and have key and value Query params and search params Authorization Building your requests

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Specifying Detail Parameters Start with ? and have key and value Query params and search params Authorization Headers and body Provides metadata and more info Building your requests

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Requests - Body The data payload Optional, but often supplied with POST and PUT requests Data types form data JSON text HTML XML files GraphQL … and more! { “name”: “Jane Doe”, “email”: “[email protected]”, “birthYear”: 1970 } JSON

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Receiving Responses Status codes (200 OK, 201 Created, 404 Not found) Headers Accessing body data Response elements

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Status Codes

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Receiving Responses They explain what happened on the server side 2xx (Success): e.g 200(Ok) 3xx (Redirection) e.g 301(Moved) 4xx (Client Error) e.g 404 (Not found) 5xx (Server Error) e.g 500(Internal Error) Status Codes Examples:

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How does all of that fit with REST?

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Why REST APIs are popular Simple and standardized Easy to understand & industry standard 1.

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Why REST APIs are popular Simple and standardized Easy to understand & industry standard Scalable and Stateless Modifications & no worry on about state 1. 2.

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Why REST APIs are popular Simple and standardized Easy to understand & industry standard Scalable and Stateless Modifications & no worry on about state High performance/Caching Reduced number of requests 1. 2. 3.

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CRUD in REST CRUD HTTP METHODS CREATE POST READ GET UPDATE PUT/PATCH DELETE DELETE

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Demo TIme

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Recap

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Continue Learning APIs as a Student Expert Student Expert certification indicates that you are proficient in the essential skills involved in building and testing API requests in Postman, including: Sending more sophisticated requests in Postman. Editing documentation for a collection. Writing basic test scripts. Running collections, passing data between requests, and scripting request execution order. Have the option to become a Student Leader in your community

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Postman Student Expert Apply here: https://bit.ly/postman-student-program

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Resources learning.postman.com Learning Center explore.postman.com API Network community.postman.com Forum