Materials:
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow communication between two computers or computer programs, and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a standard protocol for formatting and handling this communication.
For example, when you open up a website like barnard.edu on your laptop (the client), you make an HTTP GET request for content on this page, and the server handling this request returns content, in this case the HTML content of the page.
You can check out these requests when you open up the Network tab of developer tools in your browser of choice. In the image below, notice how barnard.edu is an HTTP GET request, which returns a 200 status, meaning that the request was successfully handled.
When you switch to the Response tab, you can see the response is in the form of HTML code for the webpage. Also noticed from the list of network requests that this is one of many requests needed to load a webpage, including fetching image content, stylesheets, etc.
There are several different request methods beyond GET , summarized below, which are used for handling different actions. A GET request focuses on fetching data, while POST and PUT involve creating or editing resources, for example.