Approaches to distributed API design

Now that we've talked about networking and major protocols, let's have a quick overview of distributed API design approaches.

Historically, distributed computing started with RPC in the 1970s, then detoured into object-oriented approaches (such as CORBA and Java RMI) in the 1980s and 1990s. Early in the 21st century, approaches such as REST, XML-HTTP and SOAP emerged, and in 2010s the mix was extended with GraphQL and gRPC.

Let's look at RPC and REST, the two prominent approaches.