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Now in that course section

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which I mentioned before where we added Stripe

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for handling payments to our online shop,

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I already introduced you to services and APIs,

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and I explained what that is

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and why we might wanna use that.

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So you should definitely go through that section first

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before you dive into this section here.

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I just wanna highlight one specific aspect

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on which I didn't focus back then.

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In the very first course section of this course,

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in the getting started section,

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I already mentioned that as a web developer,

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we can build websites, sometimes also called web apps,

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and that we can also build web services or APIs.

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And I now, again, wanna emphasize

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what the exact difference is

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because that will become important to understand

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what we're building in this course section

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and how it differs from the websites

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we built thus far in the course.

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When we build a website, which is essentially what we did

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throughout this entire course,

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no matter if we had a frontend only

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or frontend and backend,

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then it's all about ensuring that visitors of our website

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see some HTML page.

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It's all about displaying some HTML content

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in the browsers of our visitors in the end.

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That's the goal here.

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And therefore, of course, our responses

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that are sent back by our servers contain HTML code,

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no matter if it's hard-coded and a static website

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or if it's dynamically created

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and rendered on the server with help of templates.

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Ultimately, HTML code is returned to the visitors

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and it's the browsers of our visitors

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that will then turn this HTML code

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into the website that's displayed to our visitors.

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Now, when we built a web service or a so-called API,

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and again I'm using these terms

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kind of interchangeably here,

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then it's not all about displaying a page on the screen.

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Instead, it is about exchanging data

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and performing certain actions.

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When we used Stripe,

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it was not about showing a page on the screen,

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even though Stripe did give us that checkout page,

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but Stripe actually did way more behind the scenes.

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It handled this credit card transaction.

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It reached out to the credit card provider,

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for example, MasterCard or Visa,

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so that the charge was made.

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That all happened behind the scenes

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and these were actions provided by Stripe to us.

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So that's what the Stripe service did.

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And that's a very common use case for a service.

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When we would work with the Google Maps service

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for fetching some maps data,

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then we would probably get back some data

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in the JSON format,

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which we could then use in our own website.

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So when we deal with web services and APIs,

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it's not primarily about getting some HTML code

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that should be displayed on the screen.

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Instead, it's about exchanging data

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and what that service does behind the scenes for us.

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And therefore, when we built our own web service,

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it will also not be about writing code

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that renders templates and returns that as a response.

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Instead, it will be

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about doing certain things on the server,

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storing certain pieces of data in the database, for example,

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and it will then be about sending back data,

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JSON data as the response instead of HTML code.

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And in case you forgot why we might build such services

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or why we might use such services, well, as a developer,

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there are plenty of services that we might need to use

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to build a certain website or service on our own.

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We can also build a service

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that builds up on another service

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so that we can focus on our core business logic

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and we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time.

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We can also build our own service and earn money with that

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instead of building a website

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which might offer content to our users.

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So there are different business models

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which are possible as a web developer

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and web services are just as important as websites.