Requiem for APIs - The Evolution of Web Development
summary
Argues that modern frameworks let the server render and cache HTML so frontends often don’t need separate APIs, replacing many REST/GraphQL roundtrips. Shows a concrete example: a Prisma schema and a React Server Component that queries the database directly with no API layer, eliminating the “three requests per shipment” waterfall that broke one integration. Compares GraphQL aggregation, React Server Components, and Prisma codegen as the real tools that make atomic deployments and HTML caching practical.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker intro
- 1:02From static to dynamic websites
- 2:30Birth of single-page apps and REST APIs
- 4:38Problems with REST API documentation
- 7:28Overfetching and underfetching issues
- 8:32Microservices and frontend complexity
- 9:56GraphQL as a solution attempt
- 12:00What web apps should do
- 13:28Future: static site generation and SSR
- 16:16Benefits of server-side rendering
- 18:02Caching HTML instead of JSON
- 20:50Do we still need APIs?
- 22:18JavaScript everywhere with frameworks
- 24:03React server components demo
- 25:29Key takeaways and final thoughts
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