How To Build an API in 2022

of like the stuff you typically need to do with your data. Yeah, exactly.

usefulness of the API, right, as you know. Yeah. What's cool about that is is it covers so many of the basis. You'll be able to accept a request,

is simply the fact that LogRocket can,

or the request is denied or It hit an endpoint that's returning a 500 error or something. You're gonna be able to get access to that in LogRocket by seeing the actual network request that took place And see it as it happened when the user did the thing so that you can solve this bug and debug your API because

So in your server,

So what you'll have to do is you'll write the code.

a word for you. So maybe this is this is my input transforms output. Exactly.

route, Yeah. And you also might gain a whole lot of,

an API right now that has rid. Five endpoints. One that capitalizes, one that uppercases, one that reverses all the words,

somebody has said, And then,

And the logic For what should happen when these things run are generally either called resolvers there's also sorry. Go ahead.

And if you're thinking, I've never built an API, literally go and make rid. Though that's the authentication layer, we talked about permissions layer.

to send those requests back and forth where CRUD is more or less like a concept

Yeah. The off the shelf ones,

the very basics, and I use a piece of software called Mongoose,

what you

in addition to that video. So let's say the user Clicked on a thing. That thing hit your API, and there was an error somewhere in your API. It either returned the wrong information

you will use a CMS

Rid. And we should also say we'll talk about some of these you and then be able to

when somebody hits either an endpoint or if it's GraphQL.

is the difference between CRUD and rest because create That's true. Update, delete, whatever. What was the art? Remove, create, remove, update, delete, and then get post, put, delete. It's like, How are these things

And then you can step in and say, you know what? That was good, but I need to be able to add in a little bit more. And you can overwrite those. Keystone does this where you're like, okay, I need to write custom logic for the create the like, I don't know. You have, like, an author model, And your your author, Ronald, okay, that author has an email address. They have a name.

What comes along with the the GraphQL endpoint is either a query or a mutation. A query is you're you're querying data. A mutation usually means you're updating or deleting or mutating data in in some case.

and then one that adds Two numbers together. And those are silly use cases for an API, rest is dead. They'll tell me rest is dead.

Create, read, update, delete. That covers because

And often So when you after you've chosen your database

it also is kind of exhausting to when rid. Query the data, update the data as they need to, and sometimes that's part of your framework like Laravel.

created but not approved. There's all kinds of stuff that needs to happen inside of there totally cool, but make sure ready. Bring this token along. You know, you put it in their hand and whether you

And you do you know what really confused me as a sorry. To well, before you get on to the next bit. As a newer developer, one thing that always really confused me, I remember back in the day taking a code school classes, You're sending those messages to the server. The server accepts whatever rid type of message that is to the given location.

How your data is interacted within. And we should also say, like, you don't necessarily need a database for an API. You could you Could make an API that literally capitalizes

But what's cool about that example overall is not the

time spent.

you are.

give you the network requests a massive Database schemas or database

customer. And if it was a post request, The customer API is, generally, you're creating a customer.

modify that thing, and then return rid. Information from that request and access it. And that's really, like, what you need to know because once you know how to do that, What what about what about gRPC?

related and, you know, what are the differences there? So just to be clear that get post put those are, You know, essentially, HTTP And along with, you know, authentication even though it's it's very widely used.

and you you generally also, you change the,

program is firing off a ton of errors because you've made a mistake on your API and rid UI is having some issues. Well, this is actually a neat feature of LogRocket, which is one of our sponsors, is that when something goes wrong on your website, it gives rid you a session video replay that allows you to see what happened. But we're talking APIs today, and a relevant feature of LogRocket

only has 1 endpoint, but

and writing 4 or 5 rid of different endpoints for every single model that you have is sometimes unnecessary. So a lot of these frameworks will give you It's so classic. It's There we're at a point now where, of it in every single language. So rid based on what you want to do. So literally every single thing that you do, you type into a box and you click on save. You click on an x to delete something. You rid. QLite and In general, that, is that the web is not the only place where hit the API for podcasts. And there might be some parameters like limit. I want the

other than just a simple crud out there. And you might the important thing to know is that these things at the end of the day, this is all JavaScript where A message comes in to your your

you generally you have a on a REST API, you have a route, Meaning that somebody hit the route of forward slash API forward slash

All sorts all sorts of stuff. Yeah.

rid. Email them and create a slug for them as well. So, So, at the resolver response code and whatnot, that is a use case for the off the shelf ones as well.

You know, pure control, you gain an ease of use. Yeah. You gain an

facing words. WebSockets. Why are I forgetting words for everything today? If you want to be able to do real time stuff rid. That is not generally covered by a REST API, super simple. You can return literally any data you want. GraphQL is a little bit more involved. You have to type most of your data. Right? Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Like a Like a website or like server rendered application. I guess that's true. Like most

and you handle your your client fetching by passing in a single URL like you do in GraphQL.

I I have some interesting feelings about GraphQL lately where I just wonder if it there's

but the whole idea of GraphQL was initially just created in text form stuff.

and your users need to accept, and just the fields that you want

are in in the past, but, And then The big picture is being able to accept that request and do something with it. Exactly. And that and that's what the server does. The server handles the logic. So You have your request. Somebody hits your API, and, generally, that request will have information about what happened. 1st, the method that happened, rid. Get post, put, delete. Those are the big ones. There's a couple other ones.

So gRPC is a,

Well, we could

HTTP requests.

And the new client dot query, and then you ask for what you want, and it's fully type saved. So what it feels like to me is it Feels like many of the benefits of GraphQL parse that request,

And

Yeah, I'm into that. I've been doing quite a bit of type scripting

some of the pain

So so there you go. And I certainly have a couple of projects with GraphQL, but,

Problems with REST APIs is that generally you want to fetch multiple things at once. Like, let's say we wanted to list Fetch a list of podcasts, the

interest in chatting. So we should have Alex on on syntax. Rid Maybe we should send him a little message here. It seems to me that the benefit of I'm just looking at some example code right here. It seems that the types

You get caching on the client side with many of the clients, and, you can kinda really standardize your APIs across whatever UI you're using. If it's a iOS or a web or whatever, You can utilize the same GraphQL API with really the same queries, of the fact that the server is thinking or processing or doing all these different things, I I mean, you can do a whole lot of stuff. It's not always having to be simple create, update, delete, whatever. It can be a whole cascade of of operations.

You need powerful APIs to be able to do that, and that's what dev portal

or with with less goff than than color corded? Color coded. Color coordinated.

Slash syntax.

because or you could store a database or or use something like Redis or literally anything. Yeah. Literally anything.

it's so funny. I have so much conflict in my my brain these days about APIs, and, I think, are pretty divisive, and pure whatever, You know what you could also use for literally anything?

REST in a way, but it's really it's it's its own thing. Basically, you get end to end type saved APIs and all of this is taking place on the server. So it's not like it can be spoofed. The server is checking

A thing. It's a way to cross platform

rid. Accept credit cards from somebody, then, like, you need, like, another step further. Right? Like, those rid. Merchants need to be onboarded and cleared by the credit card

Rid. Interesting.

But then what if you don't want the show notes for every single one? add. PHP.

I know he's expressed, And since this is being all taken place on the server side, right, typically, what happens here is a request comes in. You have what either is their their cookie or their session or any of that stuff. You pull in the user information, Color coordinated. All of those things,

ingesting that swing the other way.

when You look at things like RatQuery like, the last 10% take what you've done in the UI Rid. We talk about, well, not everything is just CRUD, but a lot of it is. A lot of it is simply, I just want an endpoint to query user. I want to be able to update that user. I want to be able to multiple parts.

Yeah. It's interesting. I I've had a

All of these things that we're talking about, REST, GraphQL, gRPC and tRPC.

dev portal is our sponsor today, and it's really cool because they have easy to use APIs and SDKs the the best approach.

rid. I don't recall. It's a lightweight way to to communicate.

Interesting. There's a whole world here. I think we need to

performance issues that you have to work around.

explore this a little bit further in coming episodes.

process. I don't know if you've ever tried to become a merchant on anywhere. There's a bit of a onboarding or they need to, like, see your business documents and all of that. And it's really tricky. And if you need to do that on behalf of your merchants,

And then you would have, like, another layer, which was the publicly The GraphQL

where I just wanna be I just wanna save the freaking thing if I wanted. Rid. It's definitely got a lot better than that,

And then you also likewise have a tRPC

misinterpreting some of these demos in this code, please, let's Let's get this corrected here. We should have Alex on, who's the creator of tRPC.

it's it's really hard to say, but, like, most of the web Is built has become much more popular rid. And the output is 4, so let me cache that result rid. Create models, with the documentation

And it is So you have to be

schema several times in different ways. There there's definitely, like, I think, trade offs to GraphQL where I really like working in it, But it does feel to me more and more like a GraphQL API is something that makes more sense at a larger, more complex rid. Scale than a smaller scale. Yeah. I'll tell you my,

And say and then there are implementations will allow you to, ready. Edit something and update it and click the save button every single time that you perform an action, send a tweet like a like a video.

at least right now, I say it's probably a little bit more preferable.

TypeScript

of GraphQL, some of the setup stuff, some of the that sort of things. I haven't used it. I've only looked at the demos. So if I'm out here miss miss rid. Resolver, you accept the query by name, and then you can resolve that that information.

Yeah. Interesting.

We're gonna be talking about cake layers. PHP.

rid. I ever since I've I've been it's I have a lot of thoughts that I need to

We have GraphQL.

Cool. What else is interesting? So a lot of the newer APIs built in the last 5 or 6 years which means that rid. You will look up the currently logged in user. And that's I guess that's part of the authentication Session based stuff is generally

myself. So this is neat. Oh, TypeScript first scheme of validation with static type inference.

rid REST API is very, very simple as well. I think that was part of the draw initially to GraphQL is that, oh, the

and launch fully featured rid. Omnichannel payment solutions. What does that mean? Well, if you're making an app or a software as a service,

I I had I I joke. This is old school heads will get this.

Do I really like, I I I kind of turned into my favorite scene in Bad Santa where Bad Santa is looking at the people stealing things, and he's like,

first schema validation. Looks like they're using it boxed solutions.

a bit nicer to work with. REST API is just Well, that's a lot of data coming across the wire if you don't necessarily need the show notes for each one. So then you create a second API endpoint Some different stuff. Same with real time. If you want to have,

because REST has been around for the longest. And and REST is not

And,

You end up typing The same client Like you do a GraphQL client,

I don't know. Zod sounds like TypeScript.

GraphQL meets

You upload it in chunks.

upon REST, I would I would say,

infrastructure for your GraphQL.

Do you really need all this stuff? Like, do we really need all of it? And I I'm look looking at my API and, like, the 1 file that talks to the other file that talks to the other file to send the thing. And rid. And it almost feels like old school Redux to me where I'm like, do I really need this? Like, is this really Yeah. It's a little bit rid Too much setup and and overhead. And this then I'm glad that you say this because this time tends to happen with literally everything.

at a very simple in PHP, again, like you make add. PHP,

GraphQL because you're not necessarily relying on a schema,

You know, like, this is a lot of writing,

As much as we like to think it, there are other things. There are iOS apps. There's Android apps. There are

hit some of the growing pains, and maybe it wasn't

Next one is tRPC, which is kind of a newer thing here. And tRPC

rid. I guess the one thing we didn't mention is one of the benefits of building an API Sequelize but also a list of podcast hosts.

does. You're going to want to check it out at developer. Paymentshub.com

rid. Because And mine's done by GraphQL.

There definitely is something to be said for the simplicity of a REST API, especially

I I said I need to marinate on these thoughts a little bit more so I can properly articulate them. Rid them off right now. Yeah. I know. I I was working on, like, a little bit not like a blog post, but, like, an outline even for myself to collect some of these thoughts about,

I'll talk about tRPC in a second. But what about gRPC, Wes? Yeah.

with less goff than TypeScript

We have gRPC, You you gain an time with your children on the weekends.

And I would say that those are the most popular out there because it's been around for the longest time. In the last, what,

or a lot of these client side libraries that make by PaymentsHub If you are is it a get request? If you're generally querying a customer. If it's a put request, You're generally updating a customer and delete your generally that's the whole idea. CRUD.

types, because that might not be the same as your database types. And then you also had to create types rid For your client side, if you wanted to have a lot of the fancy caching time. Like, you could like, you you're making a type for TypeScript anyway. Like, why not use that for Parts of a user, like, somebody's

Rid. And, like, a couple years later, and people say, okay. Now we're starting to or controllers. Those are sort of the 2 big ones that happen. And What will happen is you write code inside of those. You say, Okay,

there's a there's a lot of implementations around it. Elasticsearch has their own where you can say which fields you want. But That's essentially what GraphQL is, is that you can request multiple pieces of information in the browser. Somewhere. Yeah. Somewhere generally in the browser. So that Local storage. Local score. You got it. What's the database that's in the browser? divert the work to Exactly. Mom said it was okay. Mom said it was okay. I'm allowed to query these selling These are not something that you install. These are just ideas to get or modify our our data. Rid. Let's go to the next section, which is the server layer.

where you need to collect payment, You can cache that information

And then it handles that information on the server side and will either return data correctly or return just a general response saying that that data was received or or the process that had been modification, rid. Whatever had been received successfully.

Cars. There are terminals. There are beacons. There are lots of systems in the world that are not a web browser,

But I had jokily syntax. Sign up today, and you will get 14 days for free. You can check it out and really get a handle on how your users are using your stuff. Rid. Alright. Let's move on to the next section of the cake, which is the authentication layer.

same query language even, and and know that exactly everything is going to be the same. And that That's all wonderful. But at the same time, there's potential

merchants onboarded in as little as 90 minutes. Rid. Syntax listeners who become new partners get 6 months of free data through our business reporting API. Check it out. Thank you, dev portal Payments hub for sponsoring.

this is entirely a joke, so don't Don't screen cap this audio here, but I I made the joke title for my, like, marination thoughts and blog post was GraphQL is considered harmful. Rid. But just because anytime

Yeah. I would say it's a major blind spot for me as well.

queries kind of the same way where you have then that's just another one of those use cases where we're often talking about, like, what would you use a serverless function 4 or, what types of things can you avoid, Oh, yeah. You know what? You know what I find particularly interesting is getting paid. And rid. If you're that type of a developer who's building things, any number of any number of technologies. It's so funny. Databases, and you can do anything. It can be a cascade of thing that does thing that does thing that does thing. And as long as, you know, you're making sure that the user is aware

for the majority of people using it, if they really need it, rid. In terms of, like, what it's doing for you, because there are a ton of benefits to it. Right? The type safety is really great. Type safety up and down your API is really great. Rid. The structure, the organization of everything is really great. In fact, overall, I like working in GraphQL.

when you tRPC you installed. Okay. Sorry. TRPC is one, but the rest of them are not things that you install. You certainly can install GraphQL,

but you do accept

well, maybe you should be checking out PaymentsHub.

to rid. For a 30 day free trial. No credit card required. Thank you, FreshBooks, for sponsoring. Sick. Let's go real quick. Client layer. This is not really part of an API, but People are interested in it.

inputs and outputs, and you have to have a little bit more structure around how it works.

certainly, I can see the benefit of this thing. They're using rid. A library called Zod.

rid In tRPC.

And then And when somebody I don't know a whole lot about it. I just know that it is and send it over. Even if it's a GraphQL API, create the schemas Mongoose, and whatnot. Or sometimes

We get this new thing. Everybody says it's the best thing ever, and everyone says he uses to a point where people will ask me, like, And generally, those need to communicate via an API as well. So one of the benefits to having an API is that you can use the same server the the the end thing in the browser is really, really nice as well, so I kinda want that. Yeah. I a couple of nice features, and it's a little bit easier to use.

the servers as well to get information and save information and update information.

But if you are building a larger API and something that needs to be a little bit more maintainable, the server implementation

back in the day, anytime that that cycle would happen, someone would release an inevitable blog post that was this thing is considered harmful, and it was always Hyperbolic or whatever. Yeah. So that would it was just an inside joke on my my end here.

my main product, which is

Cool. Alright. Let's get into the next section here, which is we're gonna be talking about cake.

and we have rid. T r PC. These aren't, like, the only I mean, what you you lose in flexibility

rid. We interact with with the computers.

rid able to accept those chunks on the server side and and then do what you will with them. Send them off to HTML, then, yeah, definitely doesn't need an API.

servers, so sessions gets a little bit more tricky there. So what is the Node. Js ORM that's really popular? send messages, and it is very lightweight. So

rid You know, crushing stuff. You can always look at doing something like a

browser only.

Those things generally are run on different LogRocket.

like

kids just, like, decide that that's,

will It depends on the client as well. But generally, it's just like a little, The idea is ideas 1, 2, 3, and then you you create the database that comes back. You say, if the user is there, then you return the user. Rid. And then if there is no user return, then you have to return an error message, and what's it called? Or something that sort of comes with these things built in, to interact with it. So I use MongoDB, Maybe they have books that are related. So book could be another model.

Cornet, did you say this is okay? You have to make sure you're knowledgeable about, like, performance In in plus one issues in GraphQL, you have to manage a whole, via

file upload, we've seen sillier out there. And it basically say, okay. Well, now, authentication Sometimes they are database specific, like Mongoose is just for MongoDB.

throwing into your API? You do have to be kind of considerate that when you're writing an API and you have a server here, rid. That server is is you know, it's gotta process these things, and it is just a computer somewhere running this stuff. So if you don't want to incur a bunch of performance,

they're they're authenticated

They feel very close to me. Yeah. I usually put them together in my mental picture. But Yeah. Yeah.

wherever it needs to happen instead.

And there's generally 2 ways to do that. Rid. There's JWT, JSON Web Tokens.

is the permissions. So maybe this user does exist. They're they're logged in. They have, rid

Rid.

Do do your kids are are they at that age where they're like, mom said it was okay, and then you're like, That's,

when we're working especially with databases, I have some, like, thoughts going around in my head about An episode I wanted to do, is basically a way of it it's funny. It kinda Feels a little bit like

onto the client,

even do it myself. Rid. Anyway, so there's that's JWT.

every single request that comes in, And then, like, what other layers do we have here? I have client layer, which is not really part of the API. But let's think, is there any other part of the API? Oh,

Those things can also give you a single API endpoint, but Yeah. Should we should we talk about this? This is we we get questions about this in the Pollock all the time. Should I use x or x? Service.

you wouldn't want someone to be able to query a list of all of your users and their email addresses Caitlin, did you say to ask me? They said I said no.

permissions you might have in place on on your server? It's important because,

authentication to be able to do it. But generally, there are things like deleting users or querying specific HTTP response code to something that like not found, like most websites, if it's not an application that does things, but it simply just Right? You have a large photo. You can't send that entire photo Over the wire in one go, so the browser is smart enough to

rid. Role level to be able to do the operation.

is that rid. When That doesn't have to be on 1 single server, but it can be surfaced via 1 API.

and not have to do them in your API on your your server side, options here, but these are the kind of the big boys. With rest, what you're doing is you're sending over

Yeah. It just asks the other parent. How do kids come like, I remember a child and doing that exact same thing, but, like, How do kids come up with that that, like, it's just, like, innate that, like,

serverless function or whatever you can offload to the client is good for that too. Rid. Nowadays, we're getting all sorts of cool new things in the client side via Wasm. And who knows what? Where you can do all sorts of cool image manipulation stuff without sending it off to a server somewhere. It's rid. True. And also, they can like, one neat thing about GraphQL is you can do this thing called schema stitching,

generally, that that JWT can come in and it adds something to the database that that is an API, right? Like, you know, it doesn't have to be, like, a full blown

No.

And then things like Cloudflare functions and Edge functions, often with serverless and edge compute, Rid. And, rid. To talk from your drone

rid just from being wide open. So generally, you need First schema validation.

like, what you do if one of the parents says no. The Thing you do is you just go after the other parent,

will use tokens instead because

Once they are logged in, you give them a little token and you say, Hey, rid. Anytime

like, here's my token. I'm good. I'm allowed to do these the following things. Rid. My mother said I could be here.

Having it not locked down by some sort of permission system is not really an option. You you need to have permissions on your database

Streaming or real time. What's the the database will offer bindings themselves. And generally, the bindings

rid. The actual work performed in the GraphQL API could live in where the ID is 123.

Does this user have the proper

a photo and file upload that that's not part of CRUD. Well, it kind of is, but not really because rid. Generally, when you're doing, If you use gRPC for something, tweet us at Syntax FM because it's definitely

query something or delete something

layer. And I guess maybe we should roll this in permission layer as well, or should that be its own layer of the cake? Then Sometimes that's an additional visits that URL, that's a GET request or if somebody rid Or you you come up with, a popular That has data in it and I need to be able to interact with it. I'm going to go ahead and use, you want to Anytime I need to add two numbers together, MariaDB,

Your API doesn't need rid Authentication at all. We can simply just have it wide open to the world. And in a lot of cases,

or whatever the types of

streaming.

people sign up or sign in to your application,

Meaning that it it sends the data in

especially the read APIs or the query APIs, they are wide open to the world, meaning that you don't need any we'll a security camera. You have other stuff that needs to log in, and there's no no concept of sessions. As well as

authenticate them. You see if their password is correct, generate a temporary password. Where you might want to email them. You might want to flag their account as

into the database. It's looking at the database, looking at that access role permission, and then acting as sort of like a bouncer Saying, Hey, you can come in or Hey, GTFO, get out of here. Yeah. It generally, which is, you know, a whole topic That maybe we should get into. I know that's like a kind of a divisive one. People really hate MongoDB

Totally. Oh, we forgot the caching layer. You wanna talk about that? Yeah. Yeah. We talked about caching before we recorded, and then neither of us put in the notes. It was probably So I brought it up. There's also a caching layer on top of here too, which like, a caching layer can come in handy because if your server is doing the same thing over and over again and it's always returning rid the same information.

or sometimes I'm just too exhausted to a bit of a blind spot for me, but it seems to be very popular in the outside

to do anything. So In this layer, it kind of determines who can do what. What access do you get?

It's it feels like

color then you should be able to pull it from the cache easily enough, reference that stuff rather than having to hit the database each time. This is here. If you are building your 1st API, remember we talked about an API to add two numbers together.

80% there, but the reality is it's probably closer to 50%. Yeah. Just it looks like it's 80% there. So there's so many times I'm looking at them, like, this thing's basically done. And then I just went through last night, and I I kinda did one of those

Oh, yeah. That's that's the most frustrating thing. And that's Why people don't finish things is that, and it will save an item for you. Generally,

really isn't 10%. It feels like you're almost there, but in reality, it takes because a REST API generally is you have a request, you send it, You get a response. That's it, right? Open and close. And streaming is generally you open it and you're listening for messages that come and close. And rid. That's a whole different world, but it can be still be part of your API. Yeah. Totally.

Welcome to Syntax, a podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Today, we've Got a show for you today. How to build an API. This is something we did, I don't know, probably 3 or 4 years ago. Rid. So we are going to do an updated version of that. How do you build an API? What is it? What are the parts that go into it? Should you put all of the pieces together ready. Should you reach for an off the shelf solution that sort of does a lot of that for you? but,

it's totally finished up. Oh, totally. Maybe a show that we should have at some point is, like, rid Estimating and understanding rid Courses and distributing them, let people watch them, tracking how far they have watched. All of that is done via REST APIs, Your API as well, especially with a lot of the early, like, Apollo stuff was like you would have to create these server side types, movies.

We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today. The first one is PaymentsHub rid. Debportal, your integrated payments

Color corded color coordinated

to do list of, like, what I need to get done for what time and then what feature,

my my website. It feels like you're in that zone of of redesign where all, you know, Connecting to a database and modifying or whatever the data from the database, pulling information from them. Those are all different, you know, smaller details here, but make the ease of writing SQL queries way better there because you're not actually really writing SQL queries. You're writing

coded? Color cord

I gotta get some work done.

cloud accounting. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode.

tiny little polish, the little click handler that has an edge case rid. Takes 5 hours, whereas the initial implementation

What section of the website? And I'm just like,

rid. Write down every single thing that needs to be done with it. And I'm just staring at a massive

partner to onboard and underrate your merchants.

My name is Wes Boss. Rid. I'm a developer from Canada. And with with me, as always, is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I'm doing good. Doing good. Yeah. Just, in a single go.

They do JavaScript rid session, replay, and FreshBooks as your your actual website does as well because they are all based on standards.

you generally also have Yeah. I would say

in terms of, like, the the actual back end database that you're writing. And this is, again, this is where your database lives. And, typically,

which will allow you to query, create, update, can get your Interesting use cases like Yes. Rid. 2 plus 2? That's super resource intensive. You shouldn't have to My computer's pings it with a fetch request, that's generally a POST or a PUT rid. Request.

and models are generally

write Node. Js code, and you can interface with Postgres, MySQL,

many people, when they host their database, are hosting a database that lives somewhere else Or it's running on a server somewhere, or maybe it's running on a port of the server that you're you're running on. If you've ever installed a WordPress site. You'll know that you have to configure

The API cake layers and what are types of layers that we have within our API. And usually, the lowest layer, The layer at the bottom is going to be the database layer where your database MongoDB You chose to do something super fancy that, you know, you accidentally goofed up because we all make mistakes. Right? Yeah. So head on over to logrocket.comforward/

lives and the or your data lives, I should say. And a database can be Yeah. Totally. Okay. Cool. Well, let's rid into, like, different types of APIs that you might see around their words or or I guess most of these are acronyms. Although I found out GraphQL is not really an acronym or anything. It's just a its own word.

style

SQLized code. You know, it user dot create rather than Exactly. The the the SQL query. And it looks I mean, SQL has given the name should be kind of obvious. It does not support I mean, we all have many blind spots.

document style databases, without, as being they are who they say they are, but do they have access to do this thing? Are they have the proper role? Do they meet is their account verified

Rid. And then that's always a trade off because you're not

Likewise, that is your database rid layer in your API or your website. Yeah.

But there's a lot of different database

in the tech world where if you say you use 1 type of database, people are always gonna be arguing about it or telling you you gotta use Postgres.

Cake dot PHP. Yeah. With so with any type of cake, you have You know, nice restful nights where you're not having to worry about if your LogRocket error

Rid. But, yeah, the these database layers and ORMs, I I don't use an ORM myself anymore. I was using Mongoose, but we since moved to native

Rid. And most likely, your software allows you to model those out or function. You can run that JavaScript function, give me a user And so when somebody hits that website with a post request

in just a sec. But

we'll talk about Prisma them or resize them and send them back. It's kind of up to you. So that generally takes Rid. You're gonna you're gonna be broke.

You generally also choose rid. What some of our kids will say, like, mom said to ask you. And then I'd be like, not database specific, so they're called ORMs, which allow you to rid. You have an iOS app or you have a thing.

sequelized rid To to to work directly with that. Yeah. And this I mean, this can You talk about servers, that you want,

Prism. Prisma?

There's another one that SQLize. That's the one. Okay. That's like a So what you could do is you could store 2 plus 2.

SQL Server so you can choose whatever database you want or most likely it's all right. We already have a database and and whatnot, and it's just like, this I think this is what you're referring to. It's just like, that can interpret those instructions and do what it is that you want. So post the comment on the video, like the items, start recording, package that you install yourself, like SQLizer, layer syntax delete that user You can still query GraphQL So this is where the logic for there's a bunch of more benefits to it. It has its own query interface. You can do mutations as well with it.

a MySQL database at some point in that WordPress install.

All of that kind of stuff.

ready. Okay. Here's a JavaScript of web development world.

choices out here. Postgres. It's always Postgres. Isn't that right? Like, why are we doing this? Why are we using Postgres? Alright. Well okay.

They'll throw most of this out the window and just start with a simple

raw to the metal if if that's necessarily what you need. Yeah. Totally. So At a big picture, we need some place for our data to live, and the next layer up is we need some place to be able

the native bindings have I have a server running somewhere at $5 a month where I can do that.

rid. Just in general, the server layer that you have described here, or would you say it's part of the same thing? I would say it's it's part of the same thing. Like, rid. Yeah. Most people don't really care about the difference between the 2. They just want a npm install something Or it can go a little bit deeper with things like third party login and OAuth and whatnot.

make rid Or something like that where I had something I could have done client to that service or even I could have done a serverless function or something. Right? And And I was sending all of that information to my server, which then sent it to that server. And then you that's like if you can unload things

Sometimes they are a way to interact with that database. So you generally need a piece of software that will allow you to a JavaScript or PHP or whatever way Generally, if you visit a website that is very snappy and Billing and payments all in one place with FreshBooks. Rid. You create invoices. You can get paid on FreshBooks. It gets deposited right into your bank account. You can do all of your, invoices and expenses right inside of rid. FreshBooks, you can do time tracking. If you are running a small business and you need to keep your books in order, you should check out FreshBooks at freshbooks.comforward/ but that's what you can do. Totally.

Well, there's a lot of different choices. You can use any number of databases. There's just an endless amount of them, but the most popular options are Typically, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB,

Good cakes, I'm gonna say. Right? If it's a k it's a good cake, you got more than 1 layer. You got layers and layers and layers of cakes here. So we're gonna be talking about essentially

is would you describe the ORM layer as, like, a a separate layer from

The ones that sit on top of took you 1 hour to implement. Pushing through that last bit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Rid Alright. So, let's let's get on into it. An API. Let's talk about

forever There's also session based What is Zod?

really, really, really fast returns on information by caching things that are either accessed very frequently You know me doing my stuff, working on my my Svelte refactor,

You know, a service like Redis, which is like an in memory kind of storage for information.

with our GraphQL API and, actually, that's a a positive of our GraphQL

API is that caching is really super easy for it. You can cache based on resolver, And each resolver can have its own caching mechanism

Or things that are always returning the same information no matter what. Like, for instance, we we we cache our user information so that it doesn't, Like, if you think about it every single time,

IndexedDB.

At the end of the day, that is formatted in a certain way.

The funny thing about accounting is basically anything, but anything that you're accepting money for or whatever. We all we all do money stuff. That's right. Yes. You'll wanna do all your money stuff with FreshBooks. Wes, do you wanna talk more about how you use FreshBooks? MongoDB

on fire thinking about it. You're gonna that thing is gonna fall over.

for how often that that gets saved, but you could store something like that into a,

I I mean, as long as you're accepting and and and doing invoices, you could use FreshBooks. You're doing, what online accounting?

You could say, well, the inputs are 22

And instead of going to your whole rigmarole of having to query your database and take up that time. You can get

without having a fancy package because GraphQL just needs a string rid. Use the same code, but then you can choose under the hood. They'll translate the things like create, find, delete, update.

at at the API layer to say, like, this API will always return the same information. We use a caching,

Cool.

Cool. Well, that, I think, just about covers it. Oh, no. Wait. We have also some, security by obscurity, in fact, they're just having an API endpoint that exists that can do operations on your database,

And at the very basic, you can just use a fetch request rid. That allow developers to create ecommerce websites, develop endpoint point in person point of sale application, with a fetch request will 98% of your use cases in in all APIs.

Apollo client. In the thing. They'll do caching on the client side for you, which is really nice.

request comes in and you wanna check that those users authentication roles, sure, you're gonna want to do that kind of stuff. But if If the user object hasn't changed,

In order to interact with your API, you generally need to do something in the browser or in your app.

But then once it gets a little bit more in-depth, you can get things like React Query, those systems need to talk to created RPC was was the initial one. Who did we The client side of this,

because math is not gonna change. I'm not gonna change. You will never rid to use your CPU to add those two numbers together again because you could cache them. So that'd be actually really fun. At the very least, you could cache it in memory, a popular one, but there is even a And that server generally has a bunch of

whatnot. They will be caching that data it's a little bit more involved. You have to have different special types of forms called multipart, IndexedDB. Yeah. So that's the client. There's tons of them out there. We're not gonna go through all of them. That's probably its own show, rid. I'm forgetting that the

Do something.

The instructions of what needs to happen when somebody and all of the logic As to what goes on in there, you might want to do other things like create a customer. You might want to

what is an API and what why you might need an API. So The web is generally built on on APIs, and what that means is that you have servers Yes. PaymentsHub 10.

and you

and send that information to a server.

rid. Route in your application that when posted to or hit, because when we create the user, I need to be able to 7 or 8 different servers. Right?

send a notification to someone. There's all kinds of stuff that Sort of needs to happen.

As as Database validation from

API, what they're called endpoints, Yeah. Prisma is any number of ways. Some people put them in cookies, some people put them in local storage and then send them along. Some people

we're getting closer and closer to our PHP versions of our websites, I kind of get less into the territory of,

definitely even

And generally, if you're building a back end, a large portion of what you are building on the back end is rid. 4 or 5 years, GraphQL

A URL that somebody visits,

needing an API or feeling like most sites need an API. So if you're wondering and you're sitting there, like, do I really need This do I really need an API? It really depends on what you're building. Right? It depends on who's consuming it, how many places are consuming it, and and what exists there. But,

does a specific thing, and that is what an API

is is that a good idea of what an API is got? Yeah. I would say so. I

that will take in requests

certainly different levels of it. And rid. I would recommend, if you have never built an API, schema them out.

They Something remote procedure call framework. It's created by Google.

WordPress sites typically before If if you're not thinking about, like, WP, JSON, whatever. Yeah. You hit the server, it returns HTML

standard

or you fetch request to and hit it. There's Almost twice as just as long as you spent so far to get it polished into a point where

rid. I I think your explanation of what an API is is fantastic. Yes. Yeah. And I I guess there's probably different levels of API because, like, if you have Let's say you have a PHP website

So we have REST.

Because I I've kind of

make a file called

and types and everything. It simply just could be rid. Change those methods to whatever the equivalent is in those databases.

about, like, do you need an API? A git post put delete,

Serves up

Yeah. I guess what I was getting at was more of, like, you know, Yeah. And, man, some of this stuff's really wild. I remember making some mistakes when I was a younger developer. Like, I all I wanted to do is send an image to a service

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos.