Web APIs Structures and Data Models Analysis
- Title
- Web APIs Structures and Data Models Analysis
- Date
- 2022
- Is Part Of
- 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C)
- Pages
- 84-91
- Language
- eng
- Abstract
- Microservice architectures emphasize keeping components small, to foster autonomy, low coupling and independent evolution. In this large-scale empirical study we measure the size of Web API specifications mined from open source repositories. These APIs are modeled using the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), which, in addition to documenting the offered operations, also contain schemas definitions for the data exchanged with the API request and response message payloads. This study has as a goal to build empirical knowledge about: (1) How big and diverse are real-world web APIs both in terms of their operations and data, (2) How different API structures use and reuse schema definitions. By mining public software repositories on Github, we gathered 42,194 valid OAS specifications published between 2014-2021. These specifications include descriptions of Web APIs of well-known services providers such as Google, VMware (Avi Networks), Twilio, Amazon. After measuring the size of API structures and their data model schemas, we found that most APIs are rather small. Also there is a medium correlation between the size of the APIs’ functional structures and their data models. API developers do reuse schema definitions within the same API model.
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