The data layer

The shopping application needs to be supplied with the following data:

• A list of categories
• A list of products, filtered by category and sorted by the selected criteria
• Details of a single product

This makes things pretty straightforward. So, in a moment, we'll break down exactly what sort of data responses we'll see when we make a server request.

Before this, you might notice that we're skipping over the part of the application that will integrate with the server-side. The key reason for this is that it will add complexity to our example application without adding much more value; we want to highlight the decisions that we made in order to piece together this application and do it in a concise and understandable way. While there are many features we can add to this application and indeed our previous examples, we want to make sure that the really important aspects of building an application can shine through.

Let's go back to the data that we'd like our...