Web API growing pains: Stories from client developers and their code

Author

Espinha, Tiago ; Zaidman, Andy ; Gross, Hans-Gerhard

Author_Institution

Delft Univ. of Technol., Delft, Netherlands

fYear

2014

fDate

3-6 Feb. 2014

Firstpage

84

Lastpage

93

Abstract

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 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. Our study is complemented with a set of observations regarding best practices for web API evolution.

Keywords

application program interfaces; social networking (online); software maintenance; source code (software); API providers; Facebook; Google Maps; Netflix web API; Twitter; Web API; application-to-application interaction; client developers; software evolution tasks; source code; Context; Facebook; Google; Interviews; Libraries; Twitter; Web services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE), 2014 Software Evolution Week - IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Antwerp

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747228

Filename

6747228