Our respondents used and valued a variety of programming languages. We observed a move away from SOAP generally due to its traditionally inflexible functionality. But our respondents told us it did still have a role to play in highly regulated industries, such as financial services.
The migration from SOAP to REST has often been linear. REST provides more flexibility than SOAP and offers a more effective way of bringing together data from various sources to create a more unified experience across multi-channel platforms.
Whilst REST still proves fit for purpose for small and medium businesses, we found that respondents from larger enterprises, with many complex API calls and many servers, were keen to overcome the tendency for REST to over-fetch data.
GraphQL helps to address this as it offers the ability to make precise requests to the server for no more or no less than what was needed, especially in an omni-channel setup.
Seamless integration
We found that what enterprises appreciate most is the ability to move seamlessly between API styles such as SOAP, REST, GraphQL as well as architectural styles, like monoliths and microservices architectures.
This reticence to migrate entirely from one architectural style to another was also because of the disruption this can cause to business as usual. Instead, our respondents are increasingly applying plug-in solutions to transform requests and responses into the desired programming languages.
Applying an API management tool that can interoperate between different generations of code is transformative. It means that organisations don’t have to completely re-architect and re-work their governance and security frameworks, but instead can focus on transforming and scaling to meet demand.