Creating an API Manager

In this chapter, we will be building an API Manager. This manager will be responsible for anything that has to do with getting data from online. When dealing with data online, you will typically get it in a particular format, which you then need to convert into something that your app can read.

What is an API?

An API is a web service from which an app can receive data. Typically, when you are dealing with APIs, such as YELP, they tend to change often. For our purposes, we want to use static files so that we can work through this project without having to be concerned about changes to the API. Therefore, most of the data we are going to use comes from the site, opentable.herokuapp.com, which is not managed full time and does not change often. The site's API, however, is missing some data that we need; therefore, I have updated these files (which can be found in the project files for this chapter) to include that missing data.

APIs are typically in JSON format and working...