Static Apis
Under certain circumstances, it can be beneficial to replace servers hosting a web API with a pre-generated set of data hosted as static files.
I’ve seen this idea bare fruit at work in the past and I’m about to apply the trick again in a new context.
Does this pattern have a name?
I’d like to reference some literature on the topic while planning this project but I’m struggling to find much source material.
After a few searches, groping in the dark for key words, I came across the term static API. This is an apt label for the pattern, but the sparsity of search results has me wondering if there’s a more common name for this pattern.
A few blog articles come up in web searches:
- https://www.seancdavis.com/posts/lets-talk-about-static-apis/
- https://www.seancdavis.com/posts/how-to-build-static-api/
- https://medium.com/swlh/building-systems-with-static-apis-631c165d3882
Similar concepts:
- caching
- memoization
- precomputation
- static site generation