XML-RPC and SOAP, along with custom homegrown solutions, dominated the API landscape for a long time and were all RPC-based HTTP APIs.
This became part of the basis for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). In XML, a lot of things are just strings, so you need to layer meta data on top in order to describe things such as which fields correspond to which data types. XML-RPC was problematic, because ensuring data types of XML payloads is tough. These constraints (plus a few more) allow the REST architecture to help APIs last for decades, not just years.īefore REST became popular (after companies such as Twitter and Facebook labeled their APIs as REST), most APIs were built using an XML-RPC or SOAP. REST focuses on uniformity: if you’re using HTTP you should utilize HTTP features whenever possible, instead of inventing conventions.Responses should declare cacheablility: helps your API scale if clients respect the rules.REST must be stateless: not persisting sessions between requests.Hypermedia is fundamental to REST, and is essentially just the concept of providing links to other resources.īeyond hypermedia there are a few other constraints, such as: These representations for resources, or collections of resources, which are then potentially modifiable, with actions and relationships being made discoverable via a method known as hypermedia. REST is all about a client-server relationship, where server-side data are made available through representations of data in simple formats, often JSON and XML. Sadly, that dissertation is not widely read, and so many people have their own idea of what REST is, leading to a lot of confusion and disagreement. REST stands for “ representational state transfer,” described by Roy Fielding in his dissertation.
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REST and RPC can both be used via other transportation protocols, such as AMQP, but that is another topic entirely.
REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different. For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC.
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