Understanding how apps communicate with remote servers
Modern applications need to show real content that can change over time and need to avoid hardcoding data, as we did in the previous chapters. Let's briefly cover how they do that.
Most network-connected apps use the HTTP protocol to send or receive data in the format of JSON from REST web services through a REST API.
That's a lot of words we've just thrown at you, so let's break them down:
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol for asynchronously fetching various resources from web servers. In our case, the resources are the data that our application needs to display.
- JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is the data format of the content that's transferred in HTTP requests. It's structured, lightweight, and human-readable as it consists of key-value pairs that are easy to parse and commonly used as a suitable format for data exchange between apps and web servers. In our app...
