On semantic detection of cloud API (anti)patterns

Abstract

Open standards are urgently needed for enabling software interoperability in Cloud Computing. Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) provides a set of best design principles to create interoperable REST management APIs. Although OCCI is the only standard addressing the management of any kind of cloud resources, it does not support a range of best principles related to REST design. This often worsens REST API quality by decreasing their understandability and reusability. Objective: We aim at assisting cloud developers to enhance their REST management APIs by providing a compliance evaluation of OCCI and REST best principles and a recommendation support to comply with these principles. Method: First, we leverage patterns and anti-patterns to drive respectively the good and poor practices of OCCI and REST best principles. Then, we propose a semantic-based approach for defining and detecting REST and OCCI (anti)patterns and providing a set of correction recommendations to comply with both REST and OCCI best principles. We validated this approach by applying it on cloud REST APIs and evaluating its accuracy, usefulness and extensibility. Results: We found that our approach accurately detects OCCI and REST(anti)patterns and provides useful recommendations. According to the compliance results, we reveal that there is no widespread adoption of OCCI principles in existing APIs. In contrast, these APIs have reached an acceptable level of maturity regarding REST principles. Conclusion: Our approach provides an effective and extensible technique for defining and detecting OCCI and REST (anti)patterns in Cloud REST APIs. Cloud software developers can benefit from our approach and defined principles to accurately evaluate their APIs from OCCI and REST perspectives. This contributes in designing interoperable, understandable, and reusable Cloud management APIs. Thank to the compliance analysis and the recommendation support, we also contribute to improving these APIs, which make them more straightforward.

A URI parsing technique and algorithm for anti-pattern detection in RESTful Web services

“…WS design quality is an essential aspect of developing understandable and usable SBSs (Brabra et al , 2019). Software quality assurance would be the expected result of software developers practice during the development process (De Renzis et al , 2017; Mateos et al , 2015a).…”

“…Software quality assurance would be the expected result of software developers practice during the development process (De Renzis et al , 2017; Mateos et al , 2015a). Brabra et al (2019) studied the widely used RESTful WSs in terms of URIs space design, resources representation and hyper-links support. On the other hand, Ruokonen et al (2016) evaluated the compliance of best and poor design practices in RESTful WS from the perspective of mobile applications.…”

“…Petrillo et al (2018) evaluated three types of cloud RESTful WS using a catalogue of 73 general best practices. Service anti-patterns have been the standard means to evaluate software system design quality (Brabra et al , 2019) which will lead to patterns and anti-pattern.…”

“…A URI should be easy to understand and does not merely combine strings with slashes and delimiters. Brabra et al (2019) argued that the URIs should have clear and representative definitions, which means the nodes should have meaningful names and relevant. Anti-patterns could also happen in the design of URIs, which are named as amorphous URIs, CRUD URI, pluralised nodes, contextless recourse names, non-hierarchical nodes and ambiguous names (Alshraiedeh and Katuk, 2019).…”

“…WS appears in two architectural styles: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REpresentational State Transfer (RESTful). In the past few years, RESTful WS stands out as a mainstream technology (Ma et al , 2018, 2017) because of its features such as resource representation hiding, run-time dynamic service binding, languages interoperability and flexible invocation (Brabra et al , 2019; Fokaefs and Stroulia, 2015). RESTful WS can be either dynamic or static, where dynamic WS resources can be shared or isolated from the Web environment at different time.…”