01 - Routes intro

In this module, we'll introduce the concept of routes.

Routing Defined

Routing refers to determining how an application responds to a client request to a particular endpoint. An endpoint is a path and a specific HTTP request method attached to that path (GET, POST, DELETE, PUT).

Overview

Here's a rough diagram of what's happening with our recent code that was used as a test in Postman:

screenshot

Analysis

1. A GET request is made to localhost:3000/api/test.

2. When the route is requested, Express finds the method for the specific route. The method that we already added for testing Postman is below:

   app.use('/api/test', function(req, res){
    res.send("This is data from the /api/test endpoint. It's from the server.");
   });

3. So when we go to the /api/test/ endpoint, we fire off an Express function res.send.

4. res (short for response) handles packaging up the response object.

5. The .send() method does the job of sending off the response.