Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style used for web development. Developed by Roy Fielding in his 2000 doctoral dissertation, RESTful APIs use HTTP methods to retrieve and manipulate data. It's stateless and cacheable, meaning it doesn’t store any data between subsequent requests and responses. Companies like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook use RESTful APIs

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a protocol used for exchanging structured information in web services using XML. Developed by Microsoft in 1998, it's highly extensible, stateful and can operate over HTTP, SMTP, TCP, UDP, or JMS. SOAP APIs are used by enterprise companies where a high level of security is crucial.

GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs developed by Facebook in 2012 and publicly released in 2015. It gives clients the power to specify exactly what data they need, which can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest use GraphQL APIs.

JSON-RPC and XML-RPC are remote procedure call (RPC) protocols encoded in JSON and XML respectively. They are simple and stateless—lightweight in nature and allow for structured data communication. XML-RPC predates JSON-RPC, having been developed in 1998, with JSON-RPC coming out in 2001.

WebSockets is a communication protocol that provides full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection. Developed as part of the HTML5 Initiative in 2008, it's designed to be implemented in web browsers and web servers but can be used by any client or server application. Companies like Uber use WebSockets for their real-time updating maps.

gRPC is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC framework developed by Google. It was publicly released in 2015. gRPC enables client and server applications to communicate transparently and simplifies the building of connected systems.

OData is an open protocol for creating and consuming queryable and interoperable RESTful APIs in a simple and standard way. It was initiated by Microsoft in 2007. OData APIs are used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems, and traditional websites.

AMQP is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware, with tool-specific message queuing protocols like JMS, RabbitMQ. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing, reliability, and security.

MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices, optimized for high-latency or unreliable networks. MQTT was invented by Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM, and Arlen Nipper of Arcom (now Eurotech), in 1999. It's used for remote locations where a small code footprint is required and network bandwidth is scarce.

Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform developed by LinkedIn in 2011, and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's designed to handle real-time data feeds and is widely adopted for use-cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data, and device instrumentation.

Postman is an interactive and automatic tool for verifying APIs. It was developed in 2012 by Abhinav Asthana to simplify API workflow in development and testing. Postman allows users to construct requests, which can be run directly within the tool.

Swagger (now known as OpenAPI) is a set of tools for designing, building, and documenting RESTful APIs. The Swagger specification defines a set of files required to describe such an API, and these files can then be used to generate API documentation, API testing, and SDKs.