Web APIs provide various functionalities that can be leveraged by developers in building their applications. ProgrammableWeb, which is the largest and most active web API and mashup collection, provides a record of thousands of web APIs and mashups. However, important properties about these large number of web APIs, such as their functionality and support/resources for learning, have never been studied by the existing research work. In this study, we perform an exploratory analysis on functionality and learning resources of 9,883 web APIs and 4,315 mashups listed on ProgrammableWeb, and find that: (1) web APIs provide a wide range of functionalities related to business solution, text analysis, data source, etc.; many of them are substitutable; only a minority have been used with other APIs; (2) a majority of web APIs on ProgrammableWeb have provided resources to support developers in learning how to use the APIs
- Engineering research,
- Software engineering
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/181/