API Design Learning Center

API Design: How The World Connects Itself

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Web Services have been around internally at large enterprises as long as any modular computation design. The way in which companies transferred data across a Service Oriented Architecture Protocol, or SOAP, has changed dramatically as devices and people around the world have become more connected and integrated. Instead of building APIs and Web Services that were proprietary, and difficult to learn quickly, developers and engineers are increasingly shifting towards RESTful APIs. Representative State Transfer, or simply REST, allows data to be shared across companies, platforms and languages. Never has the transfer of data been so seamless and globalized. Now, every app and program has access to Google Maps, Yahoo! Finance, Booking Servers—and data can be shared and manipulated by many "middle" companies.

SOA Web services will always have a place in the enterprise world for building powerful, secure data connections for internal stakeholders, but the rise of external and public APIs due to REST has brought on an entirely new set of challenges: greater influence of modularized design in programs, API Testing and Quality, and the API Economy. Microservices has bridged the gap between API design and software design as a way to quickly build and scale programs in an almost Agile manner.