Now that your application is complete and ready for the world to see, you can start thinking of ways to make it more popular. What if you want to allow external systems access rights to your data in a way such that they can mass produce inserts to your website without the need for users to visit the actual website?
One example that comes to mind almost immediately is how users of another website, say www.facebook.com, could upload an image to Facebook and have it automatically uploaded to your website as well.

The only way to make a scenario like this possible is by providing an API to your data and the code that gives external developers access to a suite of tools that will allow them to perform actions without the need to interact with the actual web pages.

In this chapter, we will review the following topics:

• Introducing RESTful APIs
• Installing a few basic tools
• Creating a basic API server and sample JSON data
• Responding to GET requests
• Updating data with POST and PUT
• Removing data with DELETE
• Consuming external APIs from Node.js