Lucia Cerchie and Dave Troiano build a stream:
In the space of APIs for consuming up-to-date data (say, events or state available within an hour of occurring) many API paradigms exist. There are file- or object-based paradigms, e.g., S3 access. There’s database access, e.g., direct Snowflake access. Last, we have decoupled client-server APIs, e.g., REST APIs, gRPC, webhooks, and streaming APIs. In this context, “decoupled” means that the client usually communicates with the server over a language-agnostic standard network protocol like HTTP/S, usually receives data in a standard format like JSON, and, in contrast to direct database access, typically doesn’t know what data store backs the API.
Of the above styles, more often than not, API developers settle on HTTP-based REST APIs for a number of reasons. They are incredibly popular. More developers know how to use REST APIs and are using them in production compared to other API technologies. For example, Rapid API’s 2022 State of APIs reports 69.3% of survey respondents using REST APIs in production, well above the percentage using alternatives like gRPC (8.2%), GraphQL (18.6%), or webhooks (34.6%).
Click through for a demonstration of how to take an existing REST API and build a data stream out of it using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.