Integration Shift - WebServices to Rest APIs

I have worked in an Integration space starting with WebServices which had been defacto standard for vendor neutral, technology independent way of exchanging the data & invoking back-end API.

As the Integration domain is expanding, these days REST APIs has been the emerged as a  integration approach not just on the web but also within an enterprise as an another viable option to soap/wsdl based webservcies. 

What is an Web API ? It is machine readable way of accessing the data over http in rest style approach. One way to think about this is that websites also access the same data, though the view layer is human readable, however with APIs its plain data in xml / json.

In my next post I will write about why we need APIs.....