Towards Dynamic Evolutionary Analysis of ProgrammableWeb for API-Mashup Ecosystem

Abstract

With the wide adoption of Web APIs released on Internet, users tend to reuse them for business requirements or software development. Mashup is a useful technology for composing Web APIs into a new and value-added application. With the increasing number of Web APIs and Mashups, the API-Mashup ecosystem has emerged based on the invocation relationship between Mashups and Web APIs. In this paper, we take ProgrammableWeb, a typical API-Mashup ecosystem, as an example to investigate its dynamic evolutionary analysis. Although there have been some works on the API-Mashup ecosystem, they mainly focus on static analysis, i.e., the static characteristics of the API- Mashup ecosystem on a fixed time point. This paper conducts a comprehensive study on the dynamic evolutionary analysis of the API-Mashup ecosystem with a long time range from 2005 to 2021. First, we conduct a dynamic statistical analysis based on the API-Mashup ecosystem dataset. Next, we construct two cooperation networks, one between Web APIs, and the other between their categories. And the general characteristics of the two cooperation networks are presented. Finally, we investigate the derived cooperation networks from four perspectives: dynamic characteristics, degree distribution, betweenness centrality, and assortative mixing. Meanwhile, the corresponding insights are uncovered. Our work provides a foundation for visualization and understanding of the API-Mashup ecosystem from the timeline.