A Framework for the Structural Analysis of REST APIs

Abstract

Today, REST APIs have established as a means for realizing distributed systems and are supposed to gain even more importance in the context of Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Microservices. Nevertheless, many existing REST APIs are known to be not well-designed, resulting in the absence of desirable quality attributes that truly RESTful systems entail. Although existing analysis show, that many REST APIs are not fully REST compliant, it is still an open issue how to improve this deficit and where to start. In this work, we introduce a framework for the structural analysis of REST APIs based on their description documents, as this allows for a comprehensive, well-structured analysis approach that also includes analyzing the corresponding API description languages. A first validation builds on a set of 286 real world API descriptions available as Swagger documents, and comprises their transformation into a canonical metamodel for REST APIs as well as a metrics-based analysis and discussion of their structural characteristics with respect to compliance with the REST architectural style.