This chapter covers the emerging and evolving technologies that will augment the functionality of RESTful services and provide some perspective on the future of REST as well as other real-time API supporters. We will cover some of the real-time APIs and see how they can help with respect to older ways such as polling. Given the ubiquitous popularity of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Stripe, it is no surprise that they have adopted a paradigm shift and thus provide real-time APIs to give information to the client as and when an event occurs.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
Real-time APIs
Polling
WebHooks
WebSockets
Additional real-time API supporters, which include the following:
PubSubHubbub
Server-sent events
XMPP
BOSH over XMPP
Case studies on companies using WebHooks and WebSockets
Comparison between WebHooks and WebSockets
REST and Micro Services
We will start with defining what a real-time API refers to, and then, we will...