SOAP can be used by a variety of transport protocols in addition to HTTP, for example, FTP and SMTP. The specification was made public in 1999 and is published by the W3C as an open standard. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a protocol for exchanging information encoded in Extensible Markup Language ( XML) between a client and a procedure or service that resides on the Internet. The sections that follow are a discussion of the details. The purpose of this article is to highlight the benefits and tradeoffs of the most popular API formats: SOAP, REST, GraphQL, and gRPC. Thus a reasonable question to ask is, as an Enterprise Architect, how do I pick the best API format to meet the need at hand? The answer is that it's a matter of understanding the benefits and limitations of the given format. There is no "one ring to rule them all." Instead, there are many API formats, with the most popular being SOAP, REST, GraphQL, and gRPC. However, while network communication and data structures have become more conventional over time, there is still variety among API formats. With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, service-to-service interaction facilitated by APIs will emerge as the Internet's principal activity.ĪPIs bring a new dimension to architectural design. Communication is not limited to interactions between humans and applications. One API can be used not only for PC-based computing but also for cellphones and IoT devices. The benefit of taking an API-based approach to application architecture design is that it allows a wide variety of physical client devices and application types to interact with the given application. Today's trend is to have clients interacting with an API layer representing the application on the server-side. This standardization of data formats has led to the proliferation of an architectural design that positions APIs as the linchpin in application architecture. However, for the most part, text-based JSON and a few binary formats such as Protocol Buffers and Thrift have become the lingua franca of data exchange. Early on, we started with XML, which is still used. Today, there are several conventional data formats on the landscape. The industry needed to standardize-so it did. Every company and technology had its own way of structuring data.īut, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. There were no generally accepted data formats. Yet, while the means of data exchange was standardizing, the actual data coming in over the wire was a lot less uniform. (Transporting computer tapes to and fro was a job I had in graduate school.) As network communication became standardized, information was exchanged digitally over phone lines and network wires using general-purpose protocols such as Telnet, SMTP, FTP, and HTTP. These tapes were then transported from one facility to another one miles away. Operators downloaded data onto reels of magnetic tape. Early forms for data exchange were physical. While it's true that a lot of data exchange went on within the internals of a company's mainframe, at some point, that information had to be shared with another computer. Take a moment to review the concept of data exchange if you're not already familiar with it. ![]()
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