I’m not in the IT sector but I’m beginning to understand the logic behind sending requests and receiving responses for various reasons. What was used before APIs became the standard for communication between systems?
Edit: I understand now that I’ve been in fact asking about REST API.
In: Technology
Okay, I’ve been a programmer for a long time and can answer this question, since I’ve used them all :).
It all started with Sun Microsystems. John Gage coined the term, “The network is the computer”. Meaning, you don’t want all processing to be done in one computer and want to be able to spread services across the network. They first came up with the concept called RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)
This was followed up by it’s object oriented equivalent – RMI (Remote Method Invocation).
Then CORBA (Common object request broker architecture), COM (component object model), DCOM etc came into the picture.
It was followed by the cult classic, EJB (Enterprise Java beans).
Then started the technology agnostic service paradigm XML based services (SOAP for messages and WSDL for service definition)
This has been followed by REST based services, which is the standard today
Before REST with HTTP verbs and JSON data formats became standard it was mostly proprietary API with different data types (often XML). Same concept (send text representation of objects using http. Get back a text response and interpret it as an object. ). Just less standard and more documentation heavy
Latest Answers