Are Developers Equally Concerned About Making Their APIs RESTful and the Linguistic Quality? : A Study on Google APIs

• REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style for distributed, hypermedia systems that allows communication between clients and servers using the HTTP methods and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). In the literature, researchers and practitioners defined best design practices, i.e., REST patterns, violation of which are known as REST antipatterns. Also, clients need to understand the use and purpose of APIs while consuming them. A set of best practices is defined in the literature for APIs to have a better linguistic design, i.e., linguistic patterns, violation of which are known as linguistic antipatterns. For API developers, it is challenging to ensure that their APIs are RESTful and manifest linguistic design quality. This paper investigates whether developers are equally concerned about making their APIs RESTful while also focus on designing APIs with better linguistic quality that may facilitate their comprehension and consumption. Thus, we examine the relation between RESTful and linguistic design quality in RESTful APIs. We analyzed eight Google APIs and performed the detection of 21 patterns and antipatterns on those APIs. Using the quantitative data, we performed a series of statistical tests. Results suggest a negligible relationship between RESTful and linguistic design quality. Thus, developers are unaware of whether they conjointly lack RESTful and linguistic design quality.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Antipatterns

Detection

Linguistic quality

Patterns

RESTful APIs

RESTful design

Uniform resource identifiers

Application programming interfaces (API)

Hypermedia systems

Linguistics

Anti-patterns

Design Quality

Google

Pattern

Representational state transfer

RESTful API

Pattern recognition

Software Technology

Programvaruteknik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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