Abstract
The latest trend across different industries is to move towards (open) web APIs. Creating a successful API, however, is not easy. A lot depends on consumers and their interest and willingness to work with the exposed interface. Structural quality, learning difficulty, design consistency, and backwards compatibility are some of the important factors in this process. The question, however, is how one can measure and track such attributes. This paper presents the beginnings of a measurement framework for web APIs that is based on the information readily available both to API providers and API consumers - API call responses. In particular, we analyze the tree-based hierarchical structure of JSON and XML data returned from API calls. We propose a set of easy-to-compute metrics as a starting point and describe sample usage scenarios. These metrics are illustrated by examples from some of the popular open web APIs.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Gat, I., Remencius, T., Sillitti, A., Succi, G., Vlasenko, J.: API Economy: Playing the Devil’s Advocate. Cutter IT Journal 26(9), 6–11 (2013)
Gat, I., Succi, G.: A Survey of the API Economy. Cutter Consortium Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update 14(6) (2013), http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/resource-centers/agile-project-management/sample-our-research/apmu1306.html
Clark, J., Clarke, C., De Panfilis, S., Granatella, G., Predonzani, P., Sillitti, A., Succi, G., Vernazza, T.: Selecting components in large cots repositories. Journal of Systems and Software 73(2), 323–331 (2004)
programmableweb.com, http://www.programmableweb.com/
Remencius, T., Succi, G.: Tailoring ITIL for the Management of APIs. Cutter IT Journal 26(9), 22–29 (2013)
Fielding, R.T.: Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine (2000)
apiwisdom.com, http://www.apiwisdom.com/
Scotto, M., Sillitti, A., Succi, G., Vernazza, T.: A relational approach to software metrics. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 1536–1540. ACM (2004)
Scotto, M., Sillitti, A., Succi, G., Vernazza, T.: A non-invasive approach to product metrics collection. Journal of Systems Architecture 52(11), 668–675 (2006)
Bille, P.: A survey on tree edit distance and related problems. Theoretical Computer Science 337(1), 217–239 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Janes, A., Remencius, T., Sillitti, A., Succi, G. (2014). Towards Understanding of Structural Attributes of Web APIs Using Metrics Based on API Call Responses. In: Corral, L., Sillitti, A., Succi, G., Vlasenko, J., Wasserman, A.I. (eds) Open Source Software: Mobile Open Source Technologies. OSS 2014. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 427. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55128-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55128-4_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55127-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-55128-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)