Towards Large-Scale Empirical Assessment of Web APIs Evolution

Lauro, Fabio Di; Serbout, Souhaila; Pautasso, Cesare

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_10

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…[ Koc ¸i et al 2021b, Koc ¸i et al 2021a][Koc ¸i et al 2020 propose to inform providers about API usage patterns and usability by regarding the interaction of consumers with APIs reported in logs. Finally, [Di Lauro et al 2021] study evolution by mining open-source API versions specified in the OpenAPI standard. Their analyzes focuses on the following three aspects: overall number of changes, API age, and API growth.…”

Section: Web Api Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploratory Analysis of the Structural Evolution of public REST APIs

Robles,

Potes,

Garcés

et al. 2023

Anais Do XXVI Congresso Ibero-Americano Em Engenharia De Software (CIbSE 2023)

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The software industry is in continuous evolution, forcing developers to quickly adapt to new requirements to catch up with the latest trends. A clear example is the huge demand for web-based APIs to connect all kinds of services among them. Like any other piece of software, a Web API is continuously changing, and with each change, all client applications must evolve. This adaptation process is critical and essential for software developers. In this paper, we present an exploratory evaluation of the most common changes occurring during the evolution of REST APIs. We define a taxonomy of structural API changes, which we classify according to their impact on client-side software; and propose a repository mining process to identify these changes in real Web APIs. We apply this process to a large set of Azure APIs from APISGURU, a well-known Open Source API repository. Based on the analyzed dataset from APISGURU, we found that breaking changes tend to decrease when a new version of an API from this dataset is released. Other useful findings and insights are discussed throughout the article.

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