API Paradigms

Application Programming Interface

Representational State Transfer

• Resources based
  • Which use only nouns rather than verb
• Can apply CRUD operations on them
  • Match them to http verbs
• REpresentation State Transfer
• built on top of http
• has to be stateless, not state on the server
• pagination, information and states should be stored in requests
  • to avoid issues in multi server systems
• Communicate usually in json formate
• Non-CRUD action such as Archive need to included the information in the body
  • Or something like search, which need to use additional query parameters

Advantages

• Utilised HTTP feature, can integrate into browser easily
• Standard methods names, arguments and status codes
• Easy to maintain

Disadvantages

• Big and unnecessary payloads
• Multiple HTTP roundtrips to get different resource, can not combine them

Remote procedure call (RPC)

• Enables one machine to invoke some code on another machine as if it is a local function call from user's perspective

gRPC

Advantages

• Easy to understand
• Lightweight payload
  • Payload only associate with the action itself
• High performance
  • Since they are only action oriented

Disadvantages

• Discovery is difficult
• Limited standardisation
• Leads to function explosion
  • Number of endpoint exploded as feature grows

GraphQL

• only use http post request
• for REST, over-fetching and request obsolete information may happen
• client on get the data field that they need
• single endpoint
  • query
  • mutation
• have schema, less flexible