Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 9, numbers 3 and 4, 2016 // View article

Checklist for the API Design of Web Services based on REST

Authors:
Pascal Giessler
Michael Gebhart
Roland Steinegger
Sebastian Abeck

Keywords: REST; RESTful; best practices; checklist; quality- driven; catalog; design; quality; api design; resource-orientation; SmartCampus

Abstract:
The trend towards creating web services based on the architectural style REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is unbroken. Several best practices for designing RESTful web services have been emerged in research and practice to ensure some degree of quality and share solutions to recurring challenges in the area of API design. But, these best practices are often described differently with the same meaning due to the nature of natural language. Also, they are not collected, categorized and presented in a central place but rather distributed across several pages in the World Wide Web, which impedes their application even further. Furthermore, it is often unclear which best practice has to be taken into account when designing a RESTful API for a particular scenario. In this article, we identify, collect, and categorize several best practices for designing APIs for RESTful web services and form a checklist. To support a prioritization of relevant best practices, we have mapped them on quality characteristics of the ISO/IEC 25010/2011. For illustration purpose, we apply the checklist on the CompetenceService as part of the SmartCampus ecosystem developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Pages: 41 to 51

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2016. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2016

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652