Inferring Data Contract for Web-Based API

Author

Chushu Gao ; Jun Wei ; Hua Zhong ; Tao Huang

Author_Institution

Inst. of Software, Beijing, China

fYear

2014

fDate

June 27 2014-July 2 2014

Firstpage

65

Lastpage

72

Abstract

Web-based API is a new trend for publishing services. To correctly use the API, developers should follow certain service specifications. Data contract is a service specification to express the constraints over the data model used in the APIs. Data contracts, however are not always readily available in a formalized format if not undocumented at all. In this paper, we present an approach to infer formal data contracts for Web-based API. The approach integrates information of the parameters, error messages and testing result of Web-based API. We demonstrate how this approach infers complicated data preconditions for Web-based API in the real-world Web API platforms.

Keywords

Internet; application program interfaces; data models; formal specification; inference mechanisms; Web-based API; complicated data precondition inference; data model; formal data contracts; service specifications; Classification algorithms; Contracts; Decision trees; Documentation; Libraries; Testing; Web services; Web API; data contract; web services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Web Services (ICWS), 2014 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Anchorage, AK

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-5053-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICWS.2014.22

Filename

6928882