Intro to APIs in Ruby on Rails

Why do we need to build an API?

Watch this video for a brief introduction to APIs. In mod 2, we will learn to build APIs using the Ruby on Rails framework.

Mod 2 will be our first exploration into the life of a fullstack developer. We will start the module by building an application that uses JavaScript to manipulate and render some data, but soon after, we will explore the idea of retrieving data from an external system. That’s where APIs come in!

Developers have being using Rails for over a decade to set up production-ready applications quickly and avoid spinning their wheels on trivial configuration details. While we can use Rails to make applications that have a frontend component as well, we will focus in this module on making Rails apps that are APIs. These APIs can then be used by our FE applications built with JavaScript, HTML and CSS.