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APISIX: An API Gateway the Apache Way

During the pioneer area of the World Wide Web, the content was static. To serve it, a group of developers created a web server, which is now known as the Apache Web Server.

The Apache Web Server is built around a module architecture. Developers created a module to run CGI scripts to add dynamic content to the lot. Users wrote early CGI scripts in Perl. After a while, it became evident that generating a complete HTML page from scratch was not the best way and that templating - providing an HTML page with placeholders - was a much better approach. The PHP language started like this as a simple templating engine interpreted by a module.

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What Is HTTP/3 and What Does It Mean for APIs?

The majority of APIs today are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP has been around for a very long time, in computer terms. It is the protocol underlying the Web and has changed surprisingly little since its inception in 1989. HTTP/1.1 was first standardized in 1997 and since then has been updated, but it was never replaced.

HTTP/2 was released in 2015 but did not change the way HTTP works for HTTP users. The update made the protocol more efficient by changing the way in which HTTP servers and clients communicate. However, HTTP/2 still had some shortcomings which were largely caused by the protocol using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) as its foundation.