Fetching Data with React APIs

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the demand for database-driven web applications. This increase is a consequence of the abundance of data available at this present time. With widespread internet adoption, businesses leverage web applications to interact with customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

More than ever, web developers are constantly faced with tasks such as the organization and consumption of data. Both internal and external data require us to have smart and business-oriented database-driven web applications.

As a full stack software engineer, some of your frontend tasks will be to consume data, either from an internally developed API or a third-party API. Before we delve into approaches or tools you can use to fetch data in React projects, let’s briefly discuss what APIs are all about and why they are redefining ways of building user interfaces and web applications.

An API simply allows communication...