I am hearing the word map a lot of times lately and it is confusing me a bit.
I heard today again someone saying “we have to map the endpoints”, by endpoints he meant the api endpoints, there is both REST as well as graphql API’s in the project i am working on but I still don’t understand what to map something means. We have the different parts of Frontend that make different calls to the api’s, does mapping means to link frontend to the api’s in this case?
My apologies if this is not clear enough, some help understanding would definitely be much appreciated!
The Macmillan Dictionary describes the map onto phrasal verb as:
(map something onto something) to connect one thing to another thing, for example as a way of understanding its meaning or structure
Hence “to map API 1 onto another API 2” means how the implementation of API 1 is supposed to invoke API 2 in order to achieve its functionality.
The verb “to map something” also means to discover and catalog something. In case of APIs, “we have to map the endpoints” would mean making a catalog of the endpoints and the capabilities (individual APIs / methods) they provide.