Summary

In this course you will learn how to make asynchronous requests with JavaScript (using jQuery’s AJAX functionality), and gain a better understanding of what’s actually happening when you do so. You will also learn how to use data APIs so you can take advantage of freely accessible data in your applications, including photo results, news articles and up-to-date data about the world around us.

As part of the course, you’ll be building a web app that will help people learn about a place where they want to move! Your app will query the Google Streetview, Wikipedia and New York Times APIs!

This course is also a part of our Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree.

Expected Learning

User experience is vital to the success of your website or web app. It’s important that the user’s experience be smooth and free of jank, yet the application will have to do things that take a long time to complete. AJAX allows app developers to interact with server-side APIs without pausing script execution or forcing the page to reload.

Plus, learning how to query data APIs will open you to a tremendous amount of free data that’s freely accessible. Want to build a flight tracking app? How about a photo gallery with image search? Or what about a tweet viewer? Just find an API that provides the data you need, read the documentation and sample code, and query away!

If you want to build solid and fast web applications, knowing how to query servers using AJAX is a must.

Syllabus

Inspiration

• What is AJAX?
• Why use an API?
• How can you identify AJAX requests in existing websites?

Perspiration

• Clone the Move Planner repository
• Implement the Google Streetview API
• Implement the NY Times API
• Error handling normal AJAX requests
• Implement the Wikipedia API
• Error handling JSON-P requests

Meditation

• What did you learn?
• How else can you apply AJAX to make speedy page loads?
• Go customize!

Required Knowledge

• Intermediate proficiency with JavaScript (equivalent to having finished JavaScript Basics).
• Familiarity with HTML/CSS.