2020 State of the API Report

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Key Findings The Rise of API-First Who Works with APIs A Day, Week, or Year in the Life API Strategies Executing on APIs Tooling for APIs and Development API Technologies The Future of APIs APIs and Business Initiatives Learning about APIs Report Methodology Download Report

API Technologies

Architectural style

As far as architectural styles for APIs are concerned, a sweeping majority of respondents (93.4%) were most familiar with REST. More than one-third mentioned webhooks and almost one-quarter mentioned WebSockets, which may point toward an event-driven future. Rounding out the top five are SOAP at 33.4% and GraphQL at 22.5%.

Respondents with 6+ years of API development experience were more likely to use REST than those with 0–5 years of experience.

REST: 93.4%

Webhooks: 34.4%

SOAP: 33.4%

GraphQL: 22.5%

WebSockets: 22.4%

gRPC: 6.9%

Server-Sent Events: 6.2%

AMQP: 5.5%

MQTT: 5.5%

EDI: 4.8%

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Specifications

We also asked folks which API specifications they use. JSON Schema was by far the top specification in use in 2020, at 75.6%. Swagger 2.0 was next, followed by OpenAPI 3.0. GraphQL also had some significant reported usage at 22.5% and the rest fell in line significantly behind at 5.8% and less.

Respondents with 6+ years of API development experience were more likely to use JSON Schema than those with 0–5 years of experience.

JSON Schema: 75.6%

Swagger 2.0: 43.9%

OpenAPI 3.0: 27.8%

GraphQL: 22.5%

Protocol buffers: 5.8%

RAML: 4%

AsyncAPI: 3.8%

Avro: 3.4%

API Blueprint: 2.8%

Thrift: 1.8%

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