Prof. Dr. Cesare Pautasso

Web APIs Structures and Data Models Analysis

Souhaila Serbout, Fabio Di Lauro, Cesare Pautasso

19th IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), Honululu, Hawaii, pp. 84-91

March 2022

Abstract

Microservice architectures emphasize keeping components small, to foster autonomy, low coupling, and independent evolution. In this large-scale empirical study, we measure the size of Web API specifications mined from open source repositories. These APIs are modeled using the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), which, in addition to documenting the offered operations, also contain schemas definitions for the data exchanged with the API request and response message payloads. This study has as a goal to build empirical knowledge about: (1) How big and diverse are real-world web APIs both in terms of their operations and data, (2) How different API structures use and reuse schema definitions. By mining public software repositories on Github, we gathered 42,194 valid OAS specifications published between 2014-2021.

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DOI: 10.1109/ICSA-C54293.2022.00059

PDF: ▼apiace-icsa2022.pdf (2MB)

Citation

Bibtex

@inproceedings{2022:icsa,
	author = {Souhaila Serbout and Fabio Di Lauro and Cesare Pautasso},
	title = {Web APIs Structures and Data Models Analysis},
	booktitle = {19th IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)},
	year = {2022},
	month = {March},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	organization = {IEEE},
	address = {Honululu, Hawaii},
	abstract = {Microservice architectures emphasize keeping components small, to foster autonomy, low coupling, and independent evolution. In this large-scale empirical study, we measure the size of Web API specifications mined from open source repositories. These APIs are modeled using the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), which, in addition to documenting the offered operations, also contain schemas definitions for the data exchanged with the API request and response message payloads.  This study has as a goal to build empirical knowledge about:  (1) How big and diverse are real-world web APIs both in terms of their operations and data, (2) How different API structures use and reuse schema definitions. By mining public software repositories on Github, we gathered 42,194 valid OAS specifications published between 2014-2021. },
	keywords = {API Analytics, API Size, OpenAPI},
	pages = {84-91},
	doi = {10.1109/ICSA-C54293.2022.00059}
}