Beyond REST API's - An Overview About Modern API Technologies

Explore modern API technologies beyond REST in this conference talk from Spring I/O 2022. Delve into alternatives like GraphQL, gRPC, and RSocket, understanding their pros and cons compared to REST APIs. Learn about their maturity, Spring and Spring Boot support, and see code examples and live demonstrations. Discover how these technologies address REST limitations, handle efficient data packaging, and implement features like subscriptions and bidirectional communication. Gain insights into integrating GraphQL APIs with existing applications, implementing gRPC servers, and leveraging Spring's support for annotated handlers in RSocket. Conclude with key takeaways and guiding questions to help evaluate these alternatives for your API development needs.

Intro
The REST API endpoints for the task resource might look like this
making the server an executor of an arbitrary number of different queries ...
Subscriptions allow to constantly send updates to a client based on their query...
There are many scenarios conceivable to add a GraphQL API to your existing application ...
JSON payloads are not the most efficient way to package the stuff for transportation ...
Consuming a REST API requires either some manual work or a set of tools to get going ...
The server implementation inherits from the generated services base class...
or an asynchronous one, which is useful for unbound server-streaming, for example.
Summary / Takeaways GRPC
Once a connection is established, both ends can become requester and responder
Spring supports annotated handlers to implement responders (Spring Messaging)
A few guiding questions that could make you think about any of the presented alternatives