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

Tiago Espinha, Andy Zaidman, Hans-Gerhard Gross
2014 2014 Software Evolution Week - IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering, and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE)  
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
more » ... nts. 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. 978-1-4799-3752-3/14
doi:10.1109/csmr-wcre.2014.6747228 dblp:conf/csmr/EspinhaZG14 fatcat:4cgp3zgwezdoxepa5hjpxgyqki