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

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 ones. Thus, research on best and bad practices and how to design simple but effective REST APIs is important. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, only a few recurring REST API practices have been codified in the form of design (anti)patterns, which include a name, an intent, a context, and some solutions. There are works on defining or detecting some practices, but not on codifying these practices as patterns.In this thesis, we present the most up-to-date list of REST API practices and formalise them in the form of design (anti)patterns to ease their use by developers. During this formalisation, we also devise and formalise solutions to these practices. Finally, we validate our design (anti)patterns with a survey and interviews of 55 developers, which confirm that our solutions are acceptable by practitioners and reflect real problems and solutions.iii I want to give a special thank you to my supervisor, Professor Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, for the guidance, support, and advice he has provided throughout my time as his student. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Manel Abdellatif for her help with this research. I want to express my gratitude to my committee members, Dr. Joey Paquet and Dr. Brigitte Jaumard, for their time and guidance through the thesis review.A warm thank you to those who helped with the surveys and interviews that validate this research.I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Ptidej lab for their friendship, guidance, and weekly discussion that sparkled new ideas and questions.Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, who always supported me while I worked on this research.