Randy Heffner stresses that integration doesn't just depend on REST

The importance of REST in integration strategies is indisputable, but what other resources can be equally essential to further optimising companies' digital transformation processes? This was the focus that Randy Heffner brought to the opening lecture of APIX 2022's in-person journey, in São Paulo on June 30. 

With the presentation Beyond REST: integration strategy for your digital future, Randy, one of the world's leading APIs experts, delved into technical issues, unlike his lecture at APIX 2021, when he brought an approach focused on open-ended business.

Early in his presentation, the keynote speaker, a former API lead analyst in Forrester Research, where he has served for 20 years, reinforced how tools such as Kafka, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, AMQP and gRPC can be more efficient than REST in certain cases and the reasons for being part of an API Toolbox. "REST has long solved our problems and facilitated digital transformation. However, there are times when your partner, customer, or innovator needs something other than request-reply."

He also pointed out that external connections require greater openness to internal connections and how the first step to this is to start with business design, where business and software become the same thing. "The design of the business must be mirrored in the software, so that they can easily change in the same way."

Further highlighting the importance of the technical issue, the specialist listed the fundamental elements in the construction of the technology strategy and value: Security, Performance & Latency, Ecosystem Acceptance, Management & Configuration, and Technology Diffusion.

In the final part of his presentation, Randy warned that an exclusive focus on Events may not necessarily be the best solution. "You can increase the complexity of things with Events when you insert them into places they don't belong to. If you have an entirely Events-based application, it can be very difficult to find bugs, for example." 

Regarding data, he also showed in which cases REST and GraphQL are most appropriate, reinforcing that the second does not eliminate complexity, only alters it, and pointed out the appropriate circumstances for the use of each.

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