This is sorta funny for me because as a non cs major who went into it it seems like all the api’s I work with are called rest apis and I was always wondering what a non rest api would be.
SOAP, which is basically dead, or GraphQL.
Hahaha, don’t underestimate jank ass vendor systems. My workplace has at least one business critical thing using SOAP. We’ve been spinning our wheels on deprecating the damn thing for three years.
Our government a few years ago made a cool new system to
sniff on small businesses because they don’t have enough money to defend themselves properly in courttrack cash transactions and it was so hip and new that it used SOAP. That was the first* time I worked with SOAP, until then I managed to avoid it.* I technically worked with SOAP once before but the part I worked on was like ten abstractions away from the protocol.
This is all very “old man yells at cloud”.
Interesting historical note, but things change.
I’d Agree in most cases, but not in this one.
Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat “Cars” as something different than “Motorcycles” while both a motorized vehicles.
the same is true for REST-API and other API-Types, while all of them are just a means to allow services to exchange data, they tell us a lot about how this exchange happens and what to expect, but only if we use the words in a way that they represent the concept they were meant to represent. Otherwise we end up with meaningless buzz words like “rest”, “agile”, “scrum”, “artificial intelligence” and so forth, instead of meaningful terms found in the jargon of other engineering disciplines like “magnetism”, “gravity” or “motor”.
