2022 State of the API Report

While REST remains the most-used API architecture by far, it lost a bit of ground to newcomers. Some 89% of survey takers selected it, down from 92% last year. Gaining popularity this year were Webhooks (35% versus 33% last year), GraphQL (28% versus 24%), and gRPC (11% versus 8%). Their growth in popularity comes as gRPC is used for internal microservices and GraphQL for stitching together disparate data sources.

We also asked folks which API specifications they use and love. JSON Schema was by far the most popular choice, used by 72% of respondents. The next most popular were Swagger 2.0 (55%) and OpenAPI 3.x (39%).

For a third year, respondents were more excited about working with microservices and Kubernetes than any other technology in the coming 12 months.

Participants are also discovering that microservices can bring challenges. As noted elsewhere in this report, about one in four respondents cite the proliferation of microservices as an obstacle to consuming and producing APIs.

This year we offered Web3 as a future technology choice. About one in three respondents said they were excited about working with it.

We asked survey takers where they gained most of their knowledge about APIs. The most popular answer was on the job or from coworkers (63%), followed by documentation (59%) and online classes (54%). This ranking held true across generations except for Gen Z (younger than 25), which ranked the three sources as equally popular.