Aquaponics is a technology which uses aquaculture effluent to provide nutrients for plants. It produces two crops (fish and plants) from one nitrogen source (fish feed), with such characteristics as efficient use of water and nitrogen sources, no use of fertilizers and antibiotics, and environmental friendliness, which make it a sustainable way of agricultural development. This paper divides the historical process of aquaponics into four stages: the origin stage (before 1970), the beginning stage (1970-1990), the global expansion stage (1990-2010) and the rapid growth stage (2010-present), analyzes three typical systems of aquaponics, proposes the three main developing trends of aquaponics: system construction towards uncoupled, system layout towards urbanized and three-dimensional and hardware facility towards ecological and intelligent, and puts forward four suggestions for development: strengthening the research on the transformation mechanism of nitrogen and phosphorus, building a theoretical model of the system, strengthening the application of artificial intelligence technology, and strengthening the research on commercial-scale systems.