Ask: We use Rest API in our SPAs but famous SPAs don’t follow the norm

[ForeverAPadawan]

When you read books and tutorials on how to build Single Page Applications, you will notice that all of them advocate using either REST API or GraphQL to communicate to the backend. Which is a bit strange because when you look at popular websites such as Reddit, Microsoft Azure, Google Calendar, and Dropbox, you will notice that they don’t use REST APIs for communicating to backend. Instead of REST, each of them seem to have built their own protocols. Are any of these designs made public? How do they work? I look at Google’s and found it’s incredibly hard to decipher.

I find it amusing that ordinary developers use REST API while the big boys play with more efficient ways.

Deciphering Facebook is relatively easy because they were nice enough to make theirs public (GraphQL)