This week, we'll learn about APIs (application programming interfaces) and how we can use them to communicate with other applications. In the process, we'll learn how to make API calls and work with asynchrony in JavaScript. We'll also learn about other modern JavaScript functionality such as promises and async functions. We will not use testing for async code in this section, though you should continue testing any synchronous code with Jest. While it's always a good idea to test async code and API calls, doing so is considerably more complex than the testing we did in the last section.

Independent Project Objectives

As always, we'll complete an independent project at the end of the section. This week's project will be reviewed for the following objectives:

• Does the application correctly make an API call?
• Does the application correctly parse data from the API response?
• Does the application handle errors when the API call doesn't return a 200 OK status as well as return a message if the API returns no results?
• Did you store your API key correctly and provide README instructions for setting up an API key?
• Does the app separate logic into different JavaScript files and use a static method?
• Does the application correctly use webpack?
• Code and Git documentation follow best practices (setup instructions in README, .gitignore file excluding unnecessary content from repo, detailed well-formatted commit messages, etc.)
• Does the project demonstrate concepts covered this week? If prompted, are you able to discuss the flow of your code and the concepts behind it with an instructor using correct terminology?
• Is the app in a presentable, portfolio-quality state?
• Is required functionality in place by the deadline?