The app for independent voices
APIs are ways for web applications to talk to each other and share data.
However, there are different ways to design and build APIs.
Every architectural style has its advantages and drawbacks.
REST is the most used API architecture for modern web services. It is stateless, flexible, and easy to scale but has limited support for complex queries and operations.
SOAP provides more data exchanges and error handling, but its verbose XML format leads to larger message sizes.
GraphQL is a query language that lets clients precisely define the data they need. It's efficient since it fetches exactly the required data, but it is more complex, and caching is harder.
Websocket, Webhook, and gRPC also have specific use cases.
I wrote more about API architectures here:
