Reference
Last updated on 2025-07-21 | Edit this page
Glossary
Application Programming Interface (API)
When building a web app, an API acts as a messenger that allows your app to communicate with other services or databases. The API establishes a set of protocols for retrieving data from or posting new data to a database.
Data normalization
standardizes information, like converting all text to lowercase and removing diacritics (accent marks). This allows a search interface to treat “Résumé” and “resume” as identical, ensuring more accurate and comprehensive results.
Event Listener
In JavaScript, event listeners are functions that wait for a specific interaction or “event” to occur on an HTML element, like a user clicking a button or pressing a specific key on their keyboard.
Functional Requirements
Define what a system should do, specifying its behaviors, features, and functions to meet user needs. They describe how the software will react to inputs and how it should behave in specific situations.
GitHub Repository
Often shortened to “repo,” is a centralized location where all project files are stored and managed, enabling collaborative development and version control.
JavaScript promises (async functions)
Promises are objects that represents the eventual completion (or failure) of an asynchronous operation. Promises typically do not happen as soon as a page loads, but take some time. In our case, we assign the async keyword before declaring the getData function because we know that the request for the Google Sheet data will take some time to reach our webpage. Similarly, the await keyword is used when we make the fetch request and format our fetch response in JSON because we are anticipating that the data will not arrive when the page loads.