Setting up a simple backend server

Before we can implement requests, we need to implement a server. Since we are focusing on the user interface in this book, we are going to set up a dummy server, which will allow us to test out requests. We are going to use the json-server tool to create a mock Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) from a JSON file.

Creating the db.json file

To be able to use the json-server tool, we first need to create a db.json file, which is going to contain the database for the server. The json-server tool will then create a REST API that allows us to access and modify the db.json file, as follows:

• GET requests, to view data from the file
• POST requests, to insert new data into the file
• PUT and PATCH requests, to adjust existing data in the file
• DELETE requests, to remove data from the file

The structure of the REST API is inferred from a JSON object in the db.json file. For...