Lesson 5: REST & JSON Alternatives

  Overview

  Learning Material

Resources for this lesson are accessible to you in this repository

The following learning material may be helpful but is not required. Please reference the syllabus for more details.

  Team Assignment

Overview

Purpose: Research, learn, and share industry standards, best practices, and helpful resources.
Task: Complete the assignment.

The team activity for this lesson will consist of participating in a developer forum. Each person in this class will learn from different resources, try different things, and end up with a unique knowledge base. This forum is an opportunity for you to share industry standards and best practices regarding the technologies that we are using and that you're learning about in this lesson. To receive full credit for this assignment, you must do the following:

• Use the channel in Teams called Developer Forum for this assignment.
• Pick a topic from this lesson and write a post that teaches at least one best practice or industry standard for that topic.
• Include the lesson number at the top of your post along with your title (for example: L03 - POST requests in Node.js)
• The post should consist of at least 200 words.
• Include at least two sources to site your claims.
• The post should be informative, accurate, relevant, and not just a copy and paste of another post.
• Respond to at least two peers before the end of the lesson.
• Finally, use the I-Learn quiz to report your participation in the forum.

  Personal Assignment

Overview

Purpose: Start developing a new API.
Task: Complete the assignment.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this assignment the student will be able to do the following:

• Initiate a new Node.js backend API
• Create a new database in MongoDB and connect to it from the Node.js application
• Create GET and POST requests
• Create API documentation to test API endpoints

Assignment Description

For your assignment this lesson, you will create a new project of your choosing. You will have approximately four lessons in this course to complete it, similar to the last project. This project will perform CRUD operations on a MongoDB database, be published to the web, incorporate security measures, and include API documentation.

• Decide on the project you're going to create.
• As you decide on a project, review the overall project requirements to ensure it is a good fit.
• Create a new Node.js project
• You'll use the same MongoDB cluster/account, but you should create a new database for this project. (When you connect to MongoDB Compass, you connect to your account, and your list of databases shows up in the bottom left corner.)
• Create your first REST API routes (similar to what we did with the routes and controllers folders in our first project). You will need at least one GET and one POST that are functional for this assignment.
• The Api-docs need to show routes for GET, GET by ID, POST, PUT, and DELETE. This is can be done by adding code to the routes folder and having swagger-autogen generate the swagger.json for you. Or you can modify the swagger.json directly. This is for a design-first mindset for your project.
• Create a new Render project
• Be sure to create an env file for your local MongoDB credentials, and add config vars to your Render project. Your MongoDB credentials should never get pushed to git, so be sure to include your env file in your gitignore.
• Push to GitHub.
• Publish to Render.
• Create a brief video demonstrating the functionality of your assignment. Upload it to YouTube (public or unlisted).
• Submit GitHub, Render, and YouTube links in I-Learn.
• Be sure to review the rubric below to see how you will be graded on this assignment.