Analysis of API Architecture: A Detailed Report

Web services provided by various companies in the form of various APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have increased to a very large extent in recent years. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and a message exchange protocol SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) have become prominent methods to serve the data exchange process for web services. But Recent reports state that a large number of companies are migrating from SOAP-based architecture to Representational State Transfer or REST. REST architecture is a resourceoriented architecture where resources are the entities of the system. The APIs are implemented around these resources. Also, REST architecture is stateless architecture as the client and server do not store. RESTful services return resources in some representation format. REST is a way by which a company provides a method to use its services that is provided by them exclusively. Various websites that were SOAP oriented went to REST implementation to simplify and modernize their operations. It was found that APIs were using simple HTTP verbs with no headers. REST web APIs are developed using HTTP protocol. Therefore, it makes use of all the HTTP properties like HTTP verbs, HTTP responses, header information, etc. The work presented here elaborates on the analysis of APIs using HTTP protocols and how the APIs are validated.