Architecture · 2000–now · Web Boom
REST / HTTP APIs
Resources over RPC theater. Won the API wars by being boring enough to debug with curl.
Why REST / HTTP APIs stuck
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.
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 · 2015–2023
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.