article

API governance support through the structural analysis of REST APIs

Authors:

Karolina Vukojevic-HauptAuthors Info & Claims

Computer Science - Research and Development, Volume 33, Issue 3-4

Pages 291 - 303

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-017-0384-1

Published: 01 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Today, REST APIs have established as a means for realizing distributed systems and are supposed to gain even more importance in the context of Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Microservices. Nevertheless, many existing REST APIs are known to be not well designed, resulting in the absence of desirable non-functional properties that truly RESTful systems entail. Although existing analysis show, that many REST APIs are not fully REST compliant, it is still an open issue how to improve this deficit and where to start. In this work, we apply structural analysis of REST APIs in order to support API governance, resulting in a set of basic and aggregated metrics that characterize an API set and also guide further governance tasks. We apply the structural analysis on a set of 286 real world APIs and then demonstrate how to derive suitable metrics that represent the perceived complexity of an API, complemented and validated by a survey of developers following the AHP process. As a result, we provide effective support for API governance, helping to identify and remedy problems in APIs.

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Cited By

Kotstein SDecker C(2024)RESTBERTa: a Transformer-based question answering approach for semantic search in Web API documentationCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-023-04237-x27:4(4035-4061)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10586-023-04237-x
Bogner JKotstein SPfaff T(2023)Do RESTful API design rules have an impact on the understandability of Web APIs?Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10367-y28:6Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-023-10367-y
Palma FOlsson TWingkvist AGonzalez-Huerta J(2022)Assessing the linguistic quality of REST APIs for IoT applicationsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111369191:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111369

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Published In

cover image Computer Science - Research and Development

Computer Science - Research and Development Volume 33, Issue 3-4

August 2018

70 pages

ISSN:1865-2034

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © Copyright © 2018 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2018

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Citations

Cited By

Kotstein SDecker C(2024)RESTBERTa: a Transformer-based question answering approach for semantic search in Web API documentationCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-023-04237-x27:4(4035-4061)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10586-023-04237-x
Bogner JKotstein SPfaff T(2023)Do RESTful API design rules have an impact on the understandability of Web APIs?Empirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10367-y28:6Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-023-10367-y
Palma FOlsson TWingkvist AGonzalez-Huerta J(2022)Assessing the linguistic quality of REST APIs for IoT applicationsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111369191:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111369

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