At PETRA III, the P08 beamline and the P07-DESY endstation have diffraction on thin films and nanostructures on surfaces as a major topic. Both stations additionally got a setup to scatter on liquid/air interfaces. In this talk a review about the applied methods and an insight into the future projects will be given. The reconstruction of structures can be studied in a fairly high time resolution using high energy X-ray to gain insights into film growth or catalytic reactions, for example. The benefits and drawbacks of the usage of high energy photons will be taken into consideration.