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Formalising Solutions to REST API Practices as Design (Anti)Patterns

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Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 13121))

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Abstract

REST APIs are nowadays the de-facto standard for Web applications. However, as more systems and services adopt the REST architectural style, many problems arise regularly. To avoid these repetitive problems, developers should follow good practices and avoid bad practices. Thus, research on good and bad practices and how to design a simple but effective REST API are essential. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there are only a few concrete solutions to recurring REST API practices, like “API Versioning”. There are works on defining or detecting some practices, but not on solutions to the practices. We present the most up-to-date list of REST API practices and formalize them in the form of REST API (anti)patterns. We validate our design (anti)patterns with a survey and interviews of 55 developers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://groups.google.com/g/google.public.web-apis/c/YOHPWSqcFBA.

  2. 2.

    https://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory.

  3. 3.

    http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html.

  4. 4.

    https://bit.ly/3i5CIsc.

  5. 5.

    https://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-anti-patterns/.

  6. 6.

    https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet.

  7. 7.

    https://spring.io/projects.

  8. 8.

    https://bit.ly/34AUbRu and https://bit.ly/3i6X8Ry.

  9. 9.

    https://bit.ly/2R9clXf.

  10. 10.

    https://bit.ly/2RY62pW and https://git.io/JGRwC.

  11. 11.

    https://git.io/JwWC6.

  12. 12.

    https://git.io/JwQPs and https://bit.ly/3vDwdB1.

  13. 13.

    https://bit.ly/3uCO9du.

  14. 14.

    https://acmsigsoft.github.io/EmpiricalStandards/docs/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Van Tuan Tran & Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

  2. Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Manel Abdellatif

Authors
  1. Van Tuan Tran
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  2. Manel Abdellatif
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  3. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Van Tuan Tran .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Hakim Hacid

  2. Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Odej Kao

  3. Informatica Automatica Gestio, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Massimo Mecella

  4. Departement d'Informatique, University of Quebec, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Naouel Moha

  5. UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Hye-young Paik

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Tran, V.T., Abdellatif, M., Guéhéneuc, YG. (2021). Formalising Solutions to REST API Practices as Design (Anti)Patterns. In: Hacid, H., Kao, O., Mecella, M., Moha, N., Paik, Hy. (eds) Service-Oriented Computing. ICSOC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91431-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91431-8_10

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91431-8

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