Open APIs: State of the Market, May 2010

Today, I was looking at the presentation from John Musser related to Open APIs (see below). Even though these statistics comes mainly from mashup and consumer applications, I was surprised by the fact that REST APIs are gaining market shares over SOAP APIs so rapidly.

In B2B and in the enterprise world in general SOAP is often the top choice. The advantages for SOAP often mentioned are:

• Type checking (via the WSDL files)
• Availability of development tools

On the other hand, REST offers the following:

• Lightweight and easy to build
• Human Readable Results
• Extensibility
• Scalability

In Health Care, SOAP is still widespread and prevalent. However there are some interesting projects such as NHIN Direct Health Information Exchange where the relevance of REST vs other API protocols are discussed.

It will be interesting to see what will be the outcome of such discussions.

Open APIs: State of the Market, May 2010

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