Integration, once a luxury, is now a necessity. Doing this well, however, continues to be elusive. Early attempts to build better distributed systems such as DCOM, CORBA, and SOAP were widely regarded as failures. Today the focus is on REST, RPC, and graphql style APIs.

Which is best? The go-to answer for architects is, of course, “it depends.”

In this session, we look at the various API approaches, how they attempt to deal with the challenge of decoupling client from server, evolvability, extensibility, adaptability, composability.

The biggest challenge is that needs change over time, and APIs must necessarily evolve. Versioning is challenging, and breaking changes are inevitable. You'll leave this session with a high-level understanding of these approach, their respective trade-offs and ultimately how to align your API approach with your architectural and organizational goals.