Formatting API Requests

In our own applications
- diagram
- we’ve been using private APIs for our applications
  - private API = not publicly accessible over the internet. it’s exclusively serving our own frontend and not for someone else
But usually what we want to do is let our server talk to someone else’s server and interact with it
- diagram
- public API
API refers to a COLLECTION of API endpoints!!!!

Different ways to structure our API requests

BaseURL/Endpoint?query1=value&query2=value

An endpoint is just a URL that your API listens to.
endpoints are tied to URLs, but you don’t have to redirect to a webpage to use them
When you make a request to an endpoint, the server decides how to respond — it might:
- Send back some data (like user info).
- Return a status code (like 200 OK or 404 Not Found).
- Return a new webpage
documentation usually gives which endpoints to use and its purpose
- ex) http://bored.api.lewagon.com/api/activity/ from bored.api
  - activity is an endpoint, gives u random activity

?query=value&query2=value

A way to put a key/value pair into the URL when u want to give some additional information or some parameters to a request
filtering/searching
ex from bored.api
- http://bored.api.lewagon.com/api/activity?key=5881028
- finding an activity by key
add more queries with &

BaseURL/Endpoint/{path-parameter}

after the url + endpoint, we can have this, which changes
usually to find some specific resource that exists, that can identify a resource in the API