Endpoint

An endpoint is a route to an HTTP resource that will respond with some data.

Pardon?#

Yeah, I know. Let me go again.

Your app is made up of two things: frontend and backend.

The frontend needs to be able to talk to the backend somehow. What the backend will have available for the frontend is a bunch of these things called "endpoints."

In the same way that you get a website when you visit vercel.com, there are URLs that you can visit that will give you back ugly stuff like this.

While that isn't pretty to you as a user, that's a goldmine for a developer. I can use that in my app very nicely. That endpoint is actually listing dog breeds in a format that is really convenient to use while I program.

The punchline#

That URL that you just visited is an endpoint. That endpoint just responded with some data that I can use in my app. The rest of the dog API has other endpoints that are also useful for doing different stuff within the app. There may be endpoints for updating a certain dog breed name, getting the data on a certain breed, or adding a new breed to the list.