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A Guide to the Most Popular Types of APIs: REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and gRPC

Pragati Verma on November 26, 2022

APIs are the most important component of the modern-day software development process, helping applications and services communicate and transfer cr...
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Miguel Müller

I'm writing an academic paper on gRPC. The technology offers numerous other benefits as it is linked to other cutting-edge technologies. Soon I will publish this paper.

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VishnuSankar

could you share to read once you done, like if thats possible

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Ashik Patel

That is great to hear. Good luck mate.

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Ankit Kanyal

great article had a good read reading it

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Li Zhang

Cool!

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Richard Torres

Fantastic read! Very well stated. Thanks for this gem!

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Pragati Verma

Thank you so much Richard. I am glad that you liked it! 😁

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mcwolfmm

Another article comparing protocols with architecture, apples with pears...
it is not clear if you are distinguishing between REST and RESTful (REST over HTTP).

And one small clarification. although rest is a stateless architecture, in combination with http (also stateless by definition) http sessions can be used in restful.

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Liyas Thomas

This is very informative. Learned a lot about RESTful APIs.

If anyone like to spin up any of such APIs, RESTful, GraphQL, Realtime APIs online - checkout Hoppscotch.io - helps to make requests directly from the browser.

GitHub logo hoppscotch / hoppscotch

👽 Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io

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kvetoslavnovak • Edited

Recently in my last project I needed to use SPARQL besides REST and webservices/ SOAP.
SPARQL seems very flexible. A learning curve was pretty high for me though.

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Andrianarisoa Daniel

I remember, a few years ago searching about SOAP and how to implement it, but barely found any resources. I just gave up and turned into other formats. I don't think it's a thing now in 2022.

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Nicolus • Edited

It's very much still a thing.

If you book a flight or a hotel there's a good chance it will be transmitted using SOAP as it's still the primary API used by Sabre.

If you use your company's Active Directory account to connect to third party services, there's also a good chance it uses SAML which is built on top of SOAP.

Apparently it's also used a lot in the banking field.

So yeah, noone in their right mind would use SOAP in a brand new consumer web app, but it's very common in enterprise products where security and consistency are important, so it's very likely that you'll encounter it at some point or another.

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Jorge Fuentes • Edited

Have not integrated Active Directory that much, but has been always with LDAP. I guess they are reducing SOAP lately.

Another one that uses SOAP is CAISO (California ISO), to manage power plants. A pain to implement actually.

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DB

SOAP 💀

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Amanda Swensen

Every article where SOAP is mentioned has debate in the comments whether it is good or not.

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Phoebe Green

Great post! One quick question. Is gRPC (HTTP/2) faster than REST with HTTP/2?

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binho3399

Sounds great

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Yuki Kimoto

Thanks.

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server side digest

Well, I am not clear with the implementation details of an API using REST, SOAP and gRPC

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Eun Kyung

API Tester looks good. Has anyone used it before?

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mikedevkelly

Do you think that SOAP has a future? From the list of pros and cons in the post, it doesn’t look like pros outweigh the cons, but idk 🤷‍♂️

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alessioferrine

I think this is possible if WSDL or a similar protocol, which allow generating client proxies, starts to be used for RESTful services