API architectural styles-style app

Core

• REST from the client's sideBeginner · 35 min read · Sign in to read

  Resources at URLs, a handful of methods with agreed meanings, and status codes the browser and every cache already understand. The price is that a screen is rarely one resource, so the client pays in round trips or in bytes it didn't need.

• GraphQL on the clientIntermediate · 38 min read · Sign in to read

  The screen describes the exact shape it needs and gets it in one request. The client inherits a typed schema and a normalised cache, and gives up the HTTP cache, simple status codes and cheap requests unless it adds persisted queries.

• Typed RPC from the browser: gRPC-web and tRPCIntermediate · 33 min read · Sign in to read

  Call a server function as if it were local, with types shared or generated end to end. The browser can't speak raw gRPC, so it goes through a web-compatible framing; tRPC skips schemas entirely when one TypeScript codebase owns both ends.

• Backend for frontend and API evolutionAdvanced · 29 min read · Sign in to read

  A thin server owned by the frontend team that turns many backend calls into the one response a screen needs, and the rules that let an API change without breaking clients already in people's pockets.