TY - JOUR
T1 - Web API growing pains
T2 - Loosely coupled yet strongly tied
AU - Espinha, Tiago
AU - Zaidman, Andy
AU - Gross, Hans Gerhard
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. Developers using web APIs are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In order to understand the distress caused by this imposition on web API client developers we perform a semi-structured interview with six such developers. We also investigate how major web API providers organize their API evolution, and we explore how this affects source code changes of their clients. Our exploratory qualitative study of the Twitter, Google Maps, Facebook and Netflix web APIs analyzes the state of web API evolution practices and provides insight into the impact of service evolution on client software. In order to complement the picture and also understand how web API providers deal with evolution, we investigate the server-side and client-side evolution of two open-source web APIs, namely VirtualBox and XBMC. Our study is complemented with a set of observations regarding best practices for web API evolution.
AB - Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. Developers using web APIs are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In order to understand the distress caused by this imposition on web API client developers we perform a semi-structured interview with six such developers. We also investigate how major web API providers organize their API evolution, and we explore how this affects source code changes of their clients. Our exploratory qualitative study of the Twitter, Google Maps, Facebook and Netflix web APIs analyzes the state of web API evolution practices and provides insight into the impact of service evolution on client software. In order to complement the picture and also understand how web API providers deal with evolution, we investigate the server-side and client-side evolution of two open-source web APIs, namely VirtualBox and XBMC. Our study is complemented with a set of observations regarding best practices for web API evolution.
KW - Web API
KW - Software evolution
KW - Breaking changes
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84919339677&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jss.2014.10.014
DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2014.10.014
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84919339677
SN - 0164-1212
VL - 100
SP - 27
EP - 43
JO - Journal of Systems and Software
JF - Journal of Systems and Software
ER -