API Strategy & Practice Conference 2018

APIs were a backlash. Web and mobile developers, newly unleashed upon the world of enterprise IT, saw the complexity generated by SOAP and CORBA and hated it. The result was a 15-year domination of app development by APIs based on the premise that the simplest thing one could do is to send JSON over HTTP.

Now we're building the tech stack up again. RPC systems like gRPC and code generators based on OpenAPI are becoming more popular, and are changing the fundamental abstraction behind web APIs from HTTP to remote function calls. Just making an API call increasingly requires downloading an SDK and hoping it is compatible.

Is this progress? Or are we losing sight of the simplicity and flexibility that made APIs such a success? Or has what's "simple" changed?

Meanwhile, the academics hated APIs because they weren't "REST" enough. But were they right all along?