Description: Sebastian Marulanda is an Atlanta based web developer and designer.
Third-party APIs allow us to create rich and immersive web applications by giving us access to data that we otherwise couldn’t produce ourselves. Though there are many benefits to using outside libraries, ultimately that code is outside our control, and can easily compromise the stability of our application. I recently experienced this firsthand.
Welcome back! If you followed along in Part 1 of this tutorial, you should have a locally running Express application with the appropriate routes set up for shortening URLs. These routes won’t actually perform any logic just yet, but let’s try and get our boilerplate off our local machine and up onto the web.
Although I’m most comfortable developing in PHP, I’ve found myself reaching for node.js quite often for small-ish scripting tasks. I’ve covered a couple of these projects in previous tutorials: Amazon Price Tracker and CLI Weatherman . These are all purely command line applications, though. Let’s try building an entire web application.