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Article
An exploratory study of functionality and learning resources of web APIs on Programmableweb
EASE '17: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, Karlskrona, Sweden, June 15-16
  • Yuan TIAN, Singapore Management University
  • Pavneet Singh KOCHHAR, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2017
Abstract

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

Keywords
  • Engineering research,
  • Software engineering
ISBN
9781450348041
Identifier
10.1145/3084226.3084286
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3084226.3084286
Citation Information
Yuan TIAN, Pavneet Singh KOCHHAR and David LO. "An exploratory study of functionality and learning resources of web APIs on Programmableweb" EASE '17: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, Karlskrona, Sweden, June 15-16 (2017) p. 202 - 207
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/181/