Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

Evaluación de la usabilidad de APIs web

En los últimos años las APIs web se han convertido en componentes clave para agilizar el proceso de construcción de aplicaciones. Debido a esto, resulta importante que estas sean fáciles de aprender y utilizar para no reducir la productividad de los programadores ni obstaculizar el proceso de desarrollo. La usabilidad de las APIs es entonces considerada un factor fundamental para su correcta adopción, y si bien existen estudios que proponen soluciones para evaluarla y mejorarla, estos abarcan mayormente APls locales; están más centrados sobre la documentación; suelen contemplar una limitada cantidad de características de usabilidad y, además, los resultados de investigaciones sobre usabilidad de APIs en general aún son insuficientes. Por estas razones, a través del presente trabajo se propone resolver algunos de los problemas recién mencionados mediante el estudio de la especificación OpenAPI y la construcción de un framework de evaluación de la usabilidad de APIs web.XIX Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

Why and How Java Developers Break APIs

Modern software development depends on APIs to reuse code and increase productivity. As most software systems, these libraries and frameworks also evolve, which may break existing clients. However, the main reasons to introduce breaking changes in APIs are unclear. Therefore, in this paper, we report the results of an almost 4-month long field study with the developers of 400 popular Java libraries and frameworks. We configured an infrastructure to observe all changes in these libraries and to detect breaking changes shortly after their introduction in the code. After identifying breaking changes, we asked the developers to explain the reasons behind their decision to change the APIs. During the study, we identified 59 breaking changes, confirmed by the developers of 19 projects. By analyzing the developers' answers, we report that breaking changes are mostly motivated by the need to implement new features, by the desire to make the APIs simpler and with fewer elements, and to improve maintainability. We conclude by providing suggestions to language designers, tool builders, software engineering researchers and API developers.Comment: Accepted at International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2018; 11 page