alekseisaunders / madfishapipractice

MadFish API : 100Devs Practice

An API coding practice with Node and Express making the 10 Genera of common endemic freshwater fish available.

Table of contents

• MadFish API : 100Devs Practice
  • Table of contents
  • Overview
    • The challenge
  • My process
    • Built with
    • What I learned
    • Continued development
  • Author

Overview

The challenge

Create an API using Node and Express to serve up some data. Users can use the text-input and button to get formatted client-side display, or the url https://madfish-api-100devs.herokuapp.com/api/fishGenus to fetch information from a fish.json file

• Gain familiarity and comfort using Node and Express to create an API capable of Read (GET) functionality
• Practice pushing to git and to Heroku for a live build.
• Continue to gain experience organizing code
• In addition to the base build, I added a JSON.parse(readFileSync()) to separate the json object from the server.js and main.js code

My process

Straight forward Node and Express app following past examples of creating a server in Node and utilizing Express functionality to make the code more readable.

I preferred to have my data file (fish.json) separated from my server code. A little Googling revealed how to use the readFileSync from the 'fs' module, along with JSON.parse() to make that happen.

On top of having the user by able to enter a Madagascar Fish genus in the url to facilitate a GET request and have a three parameter object returned, I wanted to practice using the '/public' folder to have client-side JavaScript available to the user.

Changes were pushed to a github repository and then, when a function build was completed, pushed to Heroku.

Built with

• VSCode
• JavaScript
• Node
• Express
• Heroku
• #100Devs
• Timeular - for keeping the sessions short and productive and preventing burnout
• Brainscape - for putting all the lessons learned into a spaced repetition format
• Focusatwill - for the background music or ambient noise to keep going

What I learned

While starting a Node and Express app is fairly straight forward, passing data back and forth between client-side JavaScript and server-side JavaScript you really need to pay attention to the json formatting.

That handling a 404 error is not as straight forward as I thought it might be (see Continued development)

Continued development

I'd like to handle a 404 error a little more gracefully than just stranding the user. This would be implemented to handle an unknown or mis-typed fish genus.

Author

• Website - Aleksei Saunders
• LinkedIn - Aleksei Saunders