Intro to Servers and API's

What is a server?

A server is a program that returns data be be used by other applications or programs
Servers can be public or private
Servers are agnostic to programming language, they are a concept

Why would you need a server?

mobile apps or websites that have a lot of content
personalize the content for a user
want to store user data
want to analyze data

How do you deliver content?

How do you deliver content?

APIs / Clientside rendering

Serve static assets, images, HTML, JS, CSS, etc
Have logic in the JavaScript on how to get specific data and insert it into the DOM
Serve data in specific format, JSON, XML, Protobuf, etc
(Use JSON unless you really need to use something else)
Many requests that are small

How do you deliver content?

APIs / Clientside rendering

Examples:

Clientside: React, AngularJS, VueJS, Elm
Serverside: Any server that returns data

How do you deliver content?

Serverside rendering

Take template and fill in data, then serve completed HTML
All data is served at one time
Usually all processing happens on the server (minimal DOM manipulation on the clientside)
One request that takes a lot of processing

How do you deliver content?

Serverside rendering

Examples:

Ruby on Rails, Django, Jinja, handlebars, ejs