Public API Choices

In summary, to choose a tool for the public API, API gateway, or BFF (Backend For Frontend) gateway, I prefer GraphQL for its features like tailing results, batching nested queries, performance tracing, and explicit caching.

	JSON RPC	GraphQL	REST	gRPC
Usecases	Etherum	Github V2, Airbnb, Facebook BFF / API Gateway	Swagger	High performance, Google, internal endpoints
Single Endpoint	✅	✅	❌	✅
Type System	✅ as weak as JSON No uint64	✅ No uint64	✅ w/ Swagger No uint64	✅ has uint64
Tailored Results	❌	✅	❌	❌
Batch nested queries	❌	✅	❌	❌
Versioning	❌	Schema Extension	Yes, w/ v1/v2 route s	Field Numbers in protobuf
Error Handling	Structured	Structured	HTTP Status Code	Structured
Cross-platform	✅	✅	✅	✅
Playground UI	❌	GraphQL Bin	Swagger	❌
Performance tracing	?	Apollo plugin	?	?
caching	No or HTTP cache control	Apollo plugin	HTTP cache control	Native support not yet. but still yes w/ HTTP cache control
Problem	Lack of community support and toolchainBarrister IDL	42.51 kb client-side bundle size	Unstructured with multiple endpoints. awful portability.	Grpc-web dev in progress140kb JS bundle. Compatibility issues: not all places support HTTP2 and grpc dependencies