API Architectural Styles

 

What are the API Architectural Styles?

The diagram below shows the common API architectural styles at a glance.

Image

🚀Let's take a closer look at the different architectural styles.

🤔How often do you know what architectural patterns are available?👀

Proposed in 2000, REST is the most commonly used style. It is often used between frontend clients and backend services. It is compliant with 6 architectural constraints. The common payload formats can be JSON, XML, HTML, or plain text.

The six architectural constraints are:

  • Uniform interface

  • Stateless

  • Cacheable

  • Code on demand

  • Layered system

  • Client-server

GraphQL was proposed in 2015 by Meta. It provides a schema-based and type system suitable for complex systems where the relationships between entities are graph-like.

Let's understand it through the diagram. GraphQL can retrieve user and order information in one request, whereas in REST, it requires multiple calls to get the information for user and order.

GraphQL is not a replacement for REST. It can be built upon existing REST services.

WebSockets are a protocol that provides full-duplex communication over TCP. Clients establish WebSockets to receive real-time updates from the backend services.

Unlike REST, which always pulls data, WebSockets enable pushing.

Webhooks are usually used for third-party asynchronous API calls.

Let's understand how it works under the hood.

As shown in the diagram, we use Stripe and PayPal for payment channels and register a Webhook for payment results. When a third-party payment service is done, it notifies the payment service if the payment is successful or failed. Webhook calls are usually part of the system's state machine.

Released in 2016, gRPC is used for communications among microservices. The gRPC library handles encoding/decoding and data transmission.

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Its payload is XML only, suitable for communications between internal systems.

🤔Over to you: What API architectural styles have you used?

Share your feedback, and if you like it, then kindly retweet the first tweet😃

New to my profile? 🎉

Hey! I am Ayush, a full-stack developer from India. I tweet about my coding journey.

Follow @ayushsoni1010 for more such content😉

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Grow with LetsGrowMore ✨

  Learning Web Development is never been an easy task for me until I get some real hands-on experience. It all started in June 2021, I was exploring an open-source program on google, and I was also using LinkedIn for finding such technically experienced people. Suddenly, a post comes into my feed and that was about LetsGrowMore. And, then I was come to know that day LetsGrowMore is not just providing open-source enthusiasts a platform to showcase their skills in a different field but also provides an opportunity to undergraduates to work together with them as an intern in various fields. I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and applied and thus opening the gateway to the Open Source world! So, Now let's talk about What community is this and how they help beginner to boost their skills. For beginners, I would first like to clear some things. Here we go🚀 What is Open Source🤔? I think you might’ve studied about this. There are generally two types of software that programmers co...
Read more

Deploy your React app using GitHub pages

Image
After gaining experience in creating React apps, it's time to explore various deployment options available to showcase your work to the world. We have been using Create React App to develop our React applications, so let’s see what it has to offer for our deployment process. 📌Introduction React is a powerful JavaScript library for building interactive user interfaces. Once you have created your React app, the next step is to deploy it to a server so that it can be accessed by the users. Assuming you have built a React app and are now searching for a means to share it with the rest of the world, there are numerous options available to deploy a React app and it’s always good to try something new. One popular and feasible option is to make use of GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a free hosting service that allows you to easily deploy and share your web projects. So, why not take advantage of this option and give it a shot? In this blog post, we will go through several steps to depl...
Read more