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I am writing a thesis which involves a comparison between RESTful web APIs and their corresponding alternatives. The problem is, I am quite biased towards REST and am failing to find any noteworthy architectural patterns that could be compared.

My comparison is going to analyze the patterns (or styles) from the consumer perspective (primarily how universal is an API for consumers).

Could you recommend me any alternatives for REST (as a software architectural pattern for comparison in the mentioned aspect? So far, I'm stuck with SOAP.

P.S. If the question is still too broad, I can narrow it down a bit.

Crossfire
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3 Answers3

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Perhaps one aspect of RESTful APIs you may want to look for is "scalability". Do REST APIs scale? If they do, why do the companies below go their own way?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data.

Falcor lets you represent all your remote data sources as a single domain model via a virtual JSON graph

Alex Nolasco
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  • Rest API is for the synchronous communication, though with client side mechanism you can get the async feeling. In the microservices context my list will be 1) Apache Thrift 2) grpc 3)GraphQL. For Async, have a look at messagebroker. – Winster Sep 10 '18 at 03:09
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In addition, an alternative to REST API is gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) ( https://grpc.io/ ).

Rohan Prabhu
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Fabio Petrillo
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  • Messaging is the major alternative to REST & SOAP that's still in use - so things like JMS, RabbitMQ and so on. You can create some highly complex, distributed systems using message passing.
  • Distributed object services like COM, Corba, EJBs. They're not really as popular today as they used to be but you certainly can find them knocking around.
  • There's also Java RMI, in fact most languages have a language specific mechanism for remote procedure calls. In a homogeneous environment they can be used as the basis of a distributed architecture.
Alex Nolasco
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sisyphus
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