REST API vs GraphQL vs gRPC - The Complete Guide

Apply best practices for designing a well-designed api to satisfy developers as customers, ensure consistency and ease of use, and stand out from competitors while reducing support costs.

Define web APIs, highlight their platform-agnostic, http-based request-response model, and compare formats (json, xml) and types, including soap, rest, GraphQL, and gRPC.

Explore soap, the simple object access protocol built on XML for RPC style requests, with extensibility for authentication, routing, and transaction federation; learn when to use it with legacy endpoints.

Explore rest api, GraphQL, and gRPC as the most popular web api types, and learn how to select the right one for your needs.

Learn how rest transfers the representation of a resource's state between client and server via http requests and json representations.

Explore the anatomy of a REST API request by identifying the http verb, url, headers, and an optional body, with an example linking these components.

Explore the rest api response structure with status code, headers, and body; see a 200 json example of an order and note that json is preferred over xml or html.

Master the four primary http verbs—get, post, put, delete—to retrieve, add, modify, and remove resources, and apply the rules on body usage and query parameters.

Develop a self-explanatory, consistent API URL structure that uses nouns only and avoids verbs. Include versioning, ID parameters, and clear entity and sub-entity paths with optional query parameters.

Understand how REST API response codes signal request outcomes and guide client behavior, from 100 to 500, with common codes like 200, 201, 400, 404, and 500.

Implement a clear versioning policy for your api and expose versioning in the url or header—avoid query parameters, ensuring clients can upgrade safely.

Learn how hypermedia as the engine of application state embeds links to related resources in the root entity, letting clients navigate from the root endpoint to status via links.

Demonstrates a Rest API via a get request with a name query parameter, showing the json response and how to inspect headers, status 200, and network activity in developer tools.

Rest API uses HTTP verbs, response codes, and URL design to manage entities, enables a simple request–response model, and highlights pitfalls to avoid in design.

Examine the problems with REST, such as fixed entity structure and the request‑response paradigm, illustrated with an employee example, and explain how GraphQL resolves these issues.

Explore the history of GraphQL, developed by Facebook as an internal replacement for REST API, first used in 2012, open-sourced three years later, and now managed by the GraphQL Foundation.

Explore GraphQL as a specification, not an implementation, and learn how it defines the structure of returned data in JSON, supports retrieve, write or change data, and subscribe to changes.

Define the schema and the entities, specify the queries, optionally define mutations and subscriptions, and implement the logic for the queries, mutations, and subscriptions in GraphQL.

Define the schema with code or sdl, expose a graphql endpoint, and validate operations. Route queries to resolvers, execute field resolvers for scalar and object types, and return json results.

Compare gRPC with REST, outlining REST's performance limits, text-based JSON messaging, and request-response constraints, and explain why push notifications and action-driven APIs motivate gRPC.

Trace gRPC's origins from Google's open-source Stubby in 2015, and explore its design principles - promoting messages and services, not objects, with free, cross-platform performance and streaming.

Discover gRPC basics as an http/2 web API using protobuf for rpc-style communication, with streaming options and browser limitations.

Explore remote procedure call (RPC) in gRPC, where the client directly invokes server methods like get weather. Compare this to REST, which uses entity-based requests instead of method calls.

Explore the four gRPC communication styles—unary, client streaming, server streaming, and bidirectional—and how they enable telemetry, chat, notifications, and real-time data exchanges, with Protobuf next.

Explore gRPC error handling, contrasting its status codes with REST Http errors, and learn common gRPC statuses such as canceled, deadline_exceeded, unavailable, and internal.

Demonstrates gRPC in action using Postman, setting the gRPC server URL, invoking the say hello method, and exchanging protobuf-defined messages.

Compare gRPC with rest and GraphQL by focusing on action-based calls, client streaming, server streaming, and bidirectional streaming. Set up protobuf and compile server and client to implement gRPC.

Compare REST API, GraphQL, and gRPC across simplicity, flexibility, performance, push notifications, browser support, and semantics to help you choose the right web API for your needs.

Compare rest api, GraphQL, and gRPC with overview, pros and cons, and a flowchart to decide when to use each, equipping you to select the best api for your project.