Now, something very important for this course is going to be our ability to test and try out our API.
Now, if it's a really simple API and you'll notice this throughout the course, a lot of the times
will just do it in the browser.
For example, ours will be local hosts instead of like zappy code here.
And you can just straight see what your API is going to look like.
But there's going to be some instances where we have to, you know, pass in a username and password,
maybe an authentication token.
And that's not covered with a standard browser like this.
You need to have some sort of way to interact with the API and create these HTP requests.
So there's lots of programs and tools out there that can help you with this.
For example, if you search, reste client windows.
If you have a Windows computer at risk client Mac, you can go find a bunch of them.
Some are free, some are paid.
Personally, the one that I use on my computer is poor.
This is, I think, a Mac exclusive.
And it does cost money, but it's a really slick one.
And basically it just allows you to really customize your HTP requests, which is what we're going to
be using to test our API and see how it works.
But this is not required by any means.
You don't have to get one of these reste clients.
In fact, what I'm going to be showing you in the course whenever we need to do this is using something
called Kerl.
So go ahead and open up the terminal on your computer.
I'm going to open up mine.
I'm on a Mac.
If you're on a Windows computer, yours is gonna be the command prompt.
And if you're on Linux, it's still going to be the terminal.
But basically the commands for Perl are all the same everywhere.
Basically, you just have to type Kerl space and then the name of the Web site that you want to visit.
So if we go back to the zappy code example, which is Zappy COCOM slash courses.
Okay.
So you can see if we do it in the browser, we get sort of the nice visualization.
But if we go ahead and copy this and bring it to our terminal and we say Kerl space and then that you
are L and I hit enter, it's going to bring back the exact same information here.
You can see this is the Jace on the displays, all the courses for zappy code.
Now when we really get into it, we're gonna be adding some additional options to this Kerl command.
We're gonna say, hey, pass in this username and password or pass in this authentication token.
So I just wanted you to know you can use Kerl, which we'll be using in the.
What we'll be using in the course.
But if you're gonna be working with API is a lot, I really recommend going and getting some sort of
rest client as they have really cool features, like you can save a bunch of those requests that you
have sort of piled up so you can quickly test your API.
You can really get to edit the pieces where, for example, you'll notice when we get to curling really
long things like we're gonna have to keep moving the cursor to find exactly what we want.
It's just a little bit smoother with those.
Okay.
So with that in place, let's go ahead and actually start building our API.