After many months and many long days, my capstone for the MITxPro Coding Bootcamp is finally finished!
I used my frontend Bad Bank website and added a backend and database to it. Specifically, I created the backend using ExpressJS and NodeJS, and incorporated a MongoDB database. I deployed my frontend and backend on Heroku and my database as a serverless MongoDB instance on Mongo Atlas. This sounds so much easier than it felt at the time!
For the backend, the ExpressJS web framework worked great and I used NodeJS to build my APIs. I used POST to create accounts by sending information through the body. Rich explained that using a POST request would also make querying for users safer, so I used that to return user information as well. When updating information I used the HTTP PUT verb and for getting all accounts, I used the GET verb.
To help abstract the data from the logic, I wrote functions for the Data Access Layer, or DAL. This was by far the most difficult part. I used MongoClient to connect to my MongoDB serverless instance where my database was deployed. I had several connection issues, but finally figured out that Heroku needed the MongoDB environmental variables to facilitate the connection. This made it so that I only had to call the process.env when making the connection to the database URL. The next issue I faced was that the database return took longer than the API calls and this was interfering with my results. I had to make the DAL function async and await each and every part of the connection. This took a really long time to figure out and I ran out of time to add extra authentication and roles to the database like I wanted.
My first full stack application is now complete! Its a fully deployed and functional website which you can check out here! I had a great time making this application and I look forward to improving it in the future.
You can check out my GitHub repository for the code that created this beautiful application.
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