API World 2017

With the advent of microservices and the proliferation of APIs, even the simplest applications require significant API orchestration logic as they find the data they depend on scattered across an ever growing number of systems. Even with the newer protocols, developers still need to do a significant amount of heavy lifting. In this fun and thought provoking talk we will take a look at a new set of technologies, currently under development, that let developers easily combine data from multiple services exposed via RESTful or GraphQL APIs by writing declarative graph queries instead of code and delegating orchestration to a new kind of "query" engine - one that understands how to talk to data services as well as APIs. We will discuss the main shortcomings of the current state of the industry, explore the possible solutions space, understand (briefly) different techniques for automating data-gathering across distributed/federated systems and, finally, take a look at a couple of real world scenarios and working code. This talk will aim to be equal parts content and inspiration. We hope to spark interest in exploring higher level abstractions and protocols for publishing and connecting systems.