TL;DR: REST endpoints cause latency and bandwidth problems. GraphQL aims to solve those issues. At the SCC, we'd like to create a prototype of a GraphQL API.
For a good number of years now, REST (Representational state transfer) has been the most common way of writing web APIs. While there is no "REST standard", the basic idea is that web servers provide access to resources through unique URLs, and those resources can provide hypertext links to other related resources.
For example, we could access the user David (the resource) through the URL http://example.com/users/david
. We can operate on that resource by using the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. To retrieve the resource's data, we can request GET http://example.com/users/david
, and receive some JSON, XML or HTML data structure with David's information in return. In that structure, we might find a link the David's friends at `http://example.com/users/