Lesson 11 - Web Service Calls In React

11.1 - Introduction To API Calls

Web Services or APIs allow different software applications to communicate with each other. In web development, APIs are essential for interacting with back-end services, retrieving data, and sending user input to a server. It's become a crucial and unavoidable part of developing modern applications.

Why API Calls are Important:

Data Retrieval: API calls allow you to fetch data from external sources, such as a database or third-party services, to display on your application. Think about a weather application. By making an API call to a weather service like OpenWeatherMap, you can retrieve the current weather data for a specific location and display it to the user.   Data Submission: Using API calls you can send user-generated data like username, password, emails, etc. to a server for storage, processing, or further actions. Consider a registration form on a website where users sign up by providing their details. When the form is submitted, an API call sends the user data to your server for processing and storage.

Dynamic Content: APIs enable you to create dynamic and interactive applications by fetching and displaying data in real-time. You can consider the social media feed as an example. When your friend publishes a new post, it is automatically displayed in your timeline without any page refresh. The social media feed makes API calls periodically on the backend to retrieve the latest posts and update the feed dynamically.

Integration: APIs let you integrate various services and functionalities into your application, such as authentication, payment processing, and third-party data sources. Payment service like Stripe offers API that allows you to integrate payment features into your application. You don't have to create or maintain any payment system, instead, you just need to make some API calls to handle transactions securely and efficiently.