The world of web development is unimaginable without advanced API technologies that allow systems to communicate with each other, providing seamless data exchange and integration. There's a reason why APIs are referred to as "programmatic communication and interaction interfaces".

For many years, REST technology was considered the standard architectural style for developing web interfaces. Recently, however, GraphQL and gRPC have emerged, both of which have pulled up different weaknesses of REST. However, all of them have their pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages. Let's talk about them in this article.

REST

Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a client-server architectural style for building networked applications. REST APIs are widely used and follow CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) principles for working with web application resources. REST was founded in 2000 by Roy Fielding.

REST can be described as a style of application architecture development that uses URLs to refer to relevant resources and HTTP methods to express the actions to be taken.

REST is based on a request-response mechanism, where a client sends a request to a server, and the server processes it and returns a response (without static). The REST API uses HTTP to transmit the status of the request, which makes it easy to determine the result of the operation.

Pros

• REST APIs are very easy to understand and implement. This is the root of the widespread popularity of this style.

• REST APIs can easily scale horizontally by adding more servers due to its stateless nature.

• The REST API uses access tokens for authorization, which can be supplemented with other authentication methods to double the security standards.

Cons

• Despite its ease of use, developing a REST API can be a hard task for an inexperienced web developer.

• REST can only be handled when connected to a network (unlike, for example, HTML web files). Autonomy suffers noticeably in such a case.

• The performance of REST APIs can be lower than that of other APIs.

Conclusion

Clear, simple, and used by millions of teams around the world, REST can be a great basic solution or starting point when developing an API for your web application.

GraphQL

A query language and runtime environment with a flexible approach to API development GraphQL — from the Facebook team.

GraphQL has a declarative syntax for defining data requirements. With GraphQL, clients can query exactly the data they need, eliminating the problem of over- or under-sampling data.

GraphQL does not use HTTP methods to manipulate data, instead using POST. Also, GraphQL has:

• Queries — to request data from the server.

• Mutations — for changing data on the server.

• Subscriptions — to receive real-time updates when data changes.

GraphQL allows the web client to determine what data is needed for a particular use case.

Pros

• GraphQL works only with the requested data. This allows for improved performance.

• Strict specification and detailed error descriptions for debugging and help you write more efficient code and automatically modify documentation for API changes.

Cons

• Due to the volume of different queries in GraphQL, the implementation of caching is complicated. Also, some queries may invoke a complex server-side operation and are often restricted.

gRPC

gRPC is the brainchild of Google, a high-performance, open-source RPC framework. Its name refers to RPC — remote procedure call.

gRPC is a framework with a client-server model of remote procedure calls. It is based on a strict approach: both client and server need access to the same schema definition.

The request and response types are defined by DSL, a protocol buffer language. The protocol buffer compiler generates artifacts of server and client code. There are several types of interactions, from traditional request-response to threading and client-side interactions (in which a single request from a client may produce multiple responses or multiple requests from a client result in a single response).

Pros

• Communication between client and server takes place via HTTP/2 in binary format — this increases the compactness and efficiency of gRPC.

• gRPC supports many programming languages out-of-the-box and saves time when creating simple code. It also improves communication between services in different programming languages.

• Thanks to TLS/SSL, gRPC helps to achieve high security.

Cons

• The data format is unreadable for humans, so additional tools are required for payload analysis and debugging. In addition, HTTP/2 is only supported via TLS in the latest versions of modern browsers.

Which solution to choose

REST, GraphQL and gRPC are three effective and modern API technologies.

• REST is self-explanatory, simple, widespread. Its architecture is well suited for static servers.

• GraphQL provides flexibility and efficient data fetching-an excellent solution for cases with complex data requirements.

• gRPC allows for high performance and has extensive streaming capabilities-it is convenient. real-time applications.