API Developers Never REST
Disclaimer: despite the controversial title, this article is not trying to show that RPC is a superior approach to REST, or GraphQL is superior to RPC. Instead, the goal of the article is to give you an overview of the approaches, their strengths and weaknesses. The final choice anyway will be a trade-off.
Even though HTTP is an application layer (i.e. L7), protocol, when it comes to API development, HTTP de facto plays the role of a lower-level transport mechanism.
There are multiple conceptually different approaches on how to implement an API on top of HTTP:
- REST
- RPC
- GraphQL
...but the actual list of things an average API developer needs to be aware of is not limited by these three dudes. There are also JSON, gRPC, protobuf, and many other terms in the realm. Let's try to sort them out, once and for all!
