1 year ago

This article underlines some of the preparation needed to code against a protocol and ends by looking at https://thenewstack.io/devs-are-excited-by-activitypub-open-protocol-for-mastodon/ as an example. However, I’m more interested in the need to get working with a new protocol immediately as a working task.

It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that a protocol can provide an API, but in that case, the protocol came first.

A protocol usually defines the communication within a bigger system, specifically the messages passed between two sub-systems.

Protocols demand a little more understanding of engineering concepts, as opposed to the clean call/response development that APIs use.