3 years ago

Category: Business, Data, firewall

Today, users increasingly demand ever more interactive experiences and they expect to be told when something has changed without hitting the refresh button.

Receiving notifications about someone liking your picture or reacting to your story on Instagram, or your Facebook news stream showing the latest updates about what your friends have been up to, are another couple of examples of frontend applications reacting to events in the backend.

Event-enabling APIs is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to event-driven architecture (EDA), and it uses EDA to support scalable, real-time (or near-real-time), push-based communication in APIs published to third parties. Being event-driven is about taking advantage of events as they happen, and consumers can register their interest (subscribe) and react to events in real-time.

In other cases, when clients need to be informed of events or the processing required for the response happens at a different time, ordinary synchronous messaging becomes tricky and event-driven APIs can aptly address such needs.