Event-driven APIs — Understanding the Principles

What are event-driven APIs? How do they differ from REST APIs? How to use the Webhooks, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events to build them?

Dunith Danushka
Tributary Data

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Photo by Cristian Dina from Pexels

In this article, you’ll learn the foundations of event-driven APIs, how they interact with consumers, the technology choices to build them, and how to document them with AsyncAPI specification.

Polling is dead. We must move on

We, as information consumers, have a craving desire to know things as they happen.

Where is my package right now? What’s the score of the game? How is Dogecoin performing today? Likewise, the list goes on. A majority of Internet users today would like information to be pushed towards them rather than pulling.

As an application builder, how do you push information to users as they happen?

Today, a good amount of Internet applications are powered by HTTP APIs. Their interaction model is request-response driven and synchronous. The only way for a consumer to know what’s going on the server is to keep polling the server. Polling is dreadful, wastes valuable CPU cycles on both ends.

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Dunith Danushka
Tributary Data

Editor of Tributary Data. Technologist, Writer, Senior Developer Advocate at Redpanda. Opinions are my own.