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Client APIs

Graph APIs are an evolution of web service APIs that serve and manipulate data for mobile & web applications. They have a number of characteristics that make them well suited to this task:

  1. Most notably, they present a data model as an entity relationship graph and an accompanying schema.

    • A well-defined model allows for a consistent view of the data and a centralized way to manipulate an instance of the model or to cache it.
    • The schema provides powerful introspection capabilities that can be used to build tools to help developers understand and navigate the model

  2. The API allows the client to fetch or mutate as much or as little information in single roundtrip between client and server. This also shrinks payload sizes and simplifies the process of schema evolution

  3. There is a well-defined standard for the API that fosters a community approach to development of supporting tools & best practices.

Athena supports the two most widely adopted standards for graph APIs: