跳到主要内容

Form of API

As platform which provides remote control of the whole website system, there are many choices of API form:

  • RESTful The most popular form of API, can be built by very basic HTTP server.
  • GraphQL Provide a flexible way to query data.
  • gRPC-web Better serialization and deserialization performance. Restricted usage by Proto definition.

It's worth noting that, each of the API form has its own advantages and disadvantages. But they are really close, they are all posible to realize stateless and single side streaming API.

In my conclusion, you can make the choice by the following factors:

  • If you want to build a website system which is easy to be used by other developers, use RESTful.
  • If you want to provide a very flexible query with field choosing, use GraphQL.
  • If you have extra requirements on reliability for developing, use gRPC-web.

RESTful Development Solution​

OJ Lab choose RESTful as the form of API, mostly because as the most popular form of API, RESTful has the most mature ecosystem, and has many useful tools to help us build the Application. (Like swagger, mock server, etc.)

The tools we used in OJ Lab includes:

See more: RESTful API Design Guide