In the previous chapters, we discussed how to create a React component, how to connect the component with a Redux Store, how to listen to an event dispatched in the component, and how to handle side effects. In Chapter 6, Extending Redux by Middleware, we used a prebuilt Representational State Transfer (REST) API and successfully fetched data from a database. 

In this chapter, we are going to explore the REST API in detail and understand how it works behind the scenes. We will continue using the code base from Chapter 7, Debugging Redux, and understand its working mechanism. 

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Setting up the backend server in our application
• Learning how to set up REST API routing endpoints
• Creating models for endpoints
• Creating helper functions required for the endpoints
• Creating controllers for the endpoints