Architecture · 2000–now · Web Boom
REST / HTTP APIs
Resources over RPC theater. Won the API wars by being boring enough to debug with curl.
REST stuck because caches, browsers, and ops tooling already spoke HTTP. RPC flavors return whenever someone discovers query parameters, then retreat. Boring won because incidents have timestamps and logs.
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Architecture · 2000–2016
SOAP / WS-*
Enterprise web services with ceremony. Interoperability theater with XML envelopes.
$ Banks and governments sunk fortunes into WS-Security, WSDL toolchains, and vendor stacks — then quietly rebuilt on REST/JSON while still paying maintenance on the old bus.
Architecture · 2015–now
GraphQL Everywhere
Clients ask for exactly what they need — and sometimes invent a second backend team to make that safe.
Platform · 1991–now
HTTP / HTTPS
The application protocol of the internet. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are evolutions, not replacements.
Architecture · 2015–now
gRPC
Binary RPC with contracts. Fast internal glue that should never face the public internet without a gateway.