Today’s Top “RESTful” Services and Why They Are Not RESTful

Renzel, Dominik; Schlebusch, Patrick; Klamma, Ralf

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35063-4_26

Cited by 25 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Although their conformance to RESTful architectural style can be a subject of further discussions [12,29], it is commonly agreed that the simplicity and consumability of underlying interfaces have contributed to the growing adoption of Web APIs [3,38].…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this work, authors retrieved a set of 222 APIs from the ProgrammableWeb directory [28] and analyzed their metrics that include the distribution of API types and input parameters and formats employed in API invocations. The later studies with more detailed insights have been published by Bülthoff and Maleshkova [3], and Renzel et al [29]. These surveys included descriptions of 45 and 20 Web APIs, respectively, selected by their popularity measure according to Alexa web ranking.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the structure and authorization management of RESTful web services

Suzic

Prünster

Ziegler

2018

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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A broad range of emerging business models relies on the continual exchange of data that flow among different services to generate additional value and derive knowledge in many domains. The magnitude of resource sharing that form the basis of these interactions raises new challenges concerning the effectivity of existing security and privacy management instruments in environments of such complexity. In this work, we examine the practical application of authorization management mechanisms employed over RESTful Web APIs, which today serve as a major approach to expose service interfaces on the web. For this purpose, we have examined the integration of security mechanisms in n=523 public Web APIs. Our findings reveal alarming integration patterns that demonstrate a rudimentary data security and privacy protection in cross-service resource sharing. Our analysis traces the cause back to the (1) shallow models and security capabilities offered by service providers, and (2) design deficiencies of dominantly applied OAuth 2.0 web authorization framework that restrict capabilities and lower the interoperability of underlying management functions. Following the initial discussion, we summarize potential solutions and establish an outline of the future work. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Authorization; Distributed systems security; Web protocol security; • Information systems → RESTful web services; Service discovery and interfaces;

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Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the structure and authorization management of RESTful web services

Suzic

Prünster

Ziegler

2018

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There have been several studies conducted that show that most APIs calling themselves RESTful are in fact not [9][10] [11]. The violation of constraints that define the REST architectural style in most cases leads to APIs that miss some of the desired quality attributes of REST compliant APIs like cacheability, scalability or loose coupling.…”

Section: An Interaction Centric Metamodel For Rest Apismentioning

confidence: 99%

A Conversation Based Approach for Modeling REST APIs

Haupt

Leymann

Pautasso

2015

2015 12th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture

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Abstract-Conversations are a well-known concept in service design to describe complex interactions between a client and one or multiple services. The REST architectural style constrains the characteristics of clients, servers and their interactions in REST architectures which consequently has an impact on conversations in such systems. The relation between conversations and REST architectures and how such RESTful conversations can be characterized has not been studied in detail yet. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of conversations in REST architectures and introduce an initial set of commonly used conversation types. Based on this, we propose to use conversations as a modeling tool for the design of REST APIs at a higher level of abstraction. We also introduce a corresponding interaction centric metamodel for REST APIs. The characterization of RESTful conversations enables a new interaction centric viewpoint on REST architectures which can be also applied for modeling REST APIs on an abstraction level that enables users to focus on the essential functionality of their REST API.

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“…While Maleshkova et al aim to draw conclusions on the state of the entire world of APIs on the Web, we focus on the most popular and common ones, substituting a larger dataset for more and other types of features. Another more recent study from 2012 was provided by Renzel et al [6], wherein the authors analyze a dataset of twenty Web APIs by a broad range of features, some of which were incorporated in our survey. Similar to our study, the dataset was gained by selecting top ranked entries from the ProgrammableWeb directory, using the number of mashups as the sorting criteria.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

RESTful or RESTless – Current State of Today’s Top Web APIs

Bülthoff

Maleshkova

2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Recent developments in the world of services on the Web show that both the number of available Web APIs as well as the applications built on top is constantly increasing. This trend is commonly attributed to the wide adoption of the REST architectural principles [1]. Still, the development of Web APIs is rather autonomous and it is up to the providers to decide how to implement, expose and describe the Web APIs. The individual implementations are then commonly documented in textual form as part of a webpage, showing a wide variety in terms of content, structure and level of detail. As a result, client application developers are forced to manually process and interpret the documentation, and to implement individual solutions with low level of interoperability and reuse. Before we can achieve a higher level of automation and can make any significant improvement to current practices and technologies, we need to reach a deeper understanding of their similarities and differences. Therefore, in this paper we present a thorough analysis of the most popular Web APIs through the examination of their documentation. We provide conclusions about common description forms, output types, usage of API parameters, invocation support, level of reusability, API granularity and authentication details. The collected data builds a solid foundation for identifying deficiencies and can be used as a basis for devising common standards and guidelines for Web API development.

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Today’s Top “RESTful” Services and Why They Are Not RESTful

Cited by 25 publications

References 9 publications

On the structure and authorization management of RESTful web services

On the structure and authorization management of RESTful web services

A Conversation Based Approach for Modeling REST APIs

RESTful or RESTless – Current State of Today’s Top Web APIs

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