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CRUD operations and how they relate to HTTP methods.
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Think about the web applications
you interact with on a daily basis.
0:00
We use applications for huge variety
of things, but at their simplest,
0:04
many follow a common pattern,
create, read, update and delete.
0:08
Take a blog or
a popular social media site, for example.
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You can usually make a new post,
that's create, view other posts,
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that's read, edit a post, that's update,
or delete a post, that's delete.
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This pattern is commonly known by
the acronym CRUD, create, read, update and
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delete.
0:30
REST APIs allow a client to manipulate
data using actions that map closely to
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the idea of CRUD.
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These actions are get,
post, put and delete.
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Get, post, put, and delete are known
as HTTP verbs or HTTP methods.
0:40
There are actually many more HTTP methods,
but
0:45
we'll concentrate on these four because
they're the most commonly used.
0:48
See the teacher's notes if you want to
learn more about HTTP protocol, but
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basically it's an agreed upon standard for
communication over the Internet.
0:55
Information in a REST API is typically
organized using nouns that describe
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what the data represents, nouns like
users, posts, movies, or recipes.
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Using HTTP methods and API nouns, a client
can tell a REST API what information
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it wants and
what it wants to do with that information.
1:13
As an example, If the client sends
a get request to the resource/movies,
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it means it expects to read or view data
representing a collection of movies.
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A post request means it
wants to create a new movie.
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Put means it wants to update
an existing movie, and
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delete means it wants to,
you got it, delete a movie.
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When we write an API,
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we're essentially programming responses
to various HTTP requests for resources.
1:38
Through code,
we say to our express application,
1:43
when a client makes a get
request to the resource/movies,
1:45
respond with a JSON object
containing a list of movies.
1:49
At the core,
that's really all an express API does.
1:52
It takes in requests, and
responds with JSON objects.
1:55
I've just thrown a lot at you that may
seem unfamiliar, but stick with it.
1:59
In the next video,
2:02
we'll build a simplified example of
how this all comes together in code.
2:03
Are you ready?
2:07
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