API style families

To simplify the landscape of API styles, we can categorize them into four distinct families. Let’s take a look at each one in detail.

Function-based APIs

Function-based APIs, such as RPC, SOAP, and gRPC, are designed to allow clients to execute commands on remote servers as if they were invoking local function calls. The primary goal of these APIs is to abstract the complexities of network communication, enabling developers to interact with remote services using familiar programming paradigms. This approach simplifies distributed computing by making remote method invocations resemble local code execution, thereby reducing the effort required to build networked applications.

Figure 5.1 illustrates the key components of function-based APIs such as gRPC and SOAP.

Figure 5.1: Components of function-based APIs

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