Begotten & Forgotten Distributed Service Technologies

Sometime around 2012, I published a similar list (up to the point of APIs). I recently put the same list in another post. I thought having this as its own post would be useful, or, at least, amusing.

The last 40 years (or, so) of distributed service technologies.

• GraphQL allowed the client to dictate the structure of the response (which allows for smaller payloads, better performance, potentially stricter contracts, fewer API calls, reduced bandwidth utilization)
• GRPC made some improvements on weaknesses in REST APIs (high performance for small messages, microservices communication, strict contracts, streaming).
• APIs formalized REST.
• REST fixed the problems in SOAP
• SOAP fixed the problems in EJBs
• EJBs fixed the problems in CORBA
• CORBA improved DCOM
• DCOM was supposed to be better than RPCs
• Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) allowed basic client-server communication (sometime in the 1980s)

Hopefully, you notice a pattern.

Before you take yourself or your current technology stack too seriously, think about it.

And, on, and on, and round, and round, we go.