HTTP and Web APIs

• Anatomy of a Web Request (slides)
• So, what's a web server?
  • A program that knows how to speak HTTP (i.e. receive and interpret HTTP requests, and send HTTP responses)
  • The http-server we use for testing is such a program.
  • Let's see this in the browser...
    • index.html, main.js, styles.css are all retrieved via HTTP
    • voter data CSV files
    • Mapbox map tiles
• An API server is just a web server built for a particular purpose.
  • E.g., data storage services -- like Firestore
  • E.g., Mapbox services -- like routing