Exploring APIs with curl
Learn how to work with APIs using curl on three standalone services.
We'll cover the following...
APIs with curl
We’ll be helping BigCo design, build, and deploy a brand-new API called the Onboarding API. This API will be used to streamline the onboarding of new customers (companies at BigCo). True to the API-first design ethos, we’ll only be building the API and not spending time writing the services behind the API. The good news is that the services we need to power our Onboarding API already exist at BigCo. We just need to take some time to get familiar with them and then we’ll be ready to start the work of designing, building, and releasing our API into the world.
Like any major company, BigCo has lots of services that are already up and running. We’ll only be focusing on three of them in this course:
- Activity
- Account
- Company
These are all fully functional and standalone services. The Account and Company services handle the details of managing partner companies and their associated account records. The Activity service handles the details of scheduling and tracking any activity—such as emails, phone calls, office visits, and so on—related to the company and account records.
Looking ahead, what we’ll be tasked with is to design and build a single workflow process that handles the customer onboarding experience. To do that, we’ll need to blend a bit of all three of the back-end services available to us.
For that reason, it’s important that we get to know each of these back-end services well enough to recognize the available operations each of them supports. We’ll also need to eventually blend these three services in order to create the onboarding experience the manager at BigCo is requesting.
Note: curl is the command-line tool for transferring data with URLs. We’ll cover just the basics of curl here.
The Activity service
The Activity service is a very simple component that supports scheduling contacts between BigCo and partner companies (and their accounts). This service utilizes a JSON-only style of API responses. BigCo often sends welcome emails, schedules follow-up phone calls, and has other points of contact. We’ll focus on scheduling ...