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Visual modeling of RESTful conversations with RESTalk

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Abstract

The cost savings introduced by Web services through code reuse and integration opportunities have motivated many businesses to develop Web APIs, with ever increasing numbers opting for the REST architectural style. RESTful Web APIs are decomposed in multiple resources, which the client can manipulate through HTTP interactions with well-defined semantics. Getting the resource in the desired state might require multiple client–server interactions, what we define as a RESTful conversation. RESTful conversations are dynamically guided by hypermedia controls, such as links. Thus, when deciding whether and how to use a given RESTful service, the client might not be aware of all the interactions which are necessary to achieve its goal. This is because existing documentation of RESTful APIs describes the static structure of the interface, exposing low-level HTTP details, while little attention has been paid to conceptual, high-level, modeling of the dynamics of RESTful conversations. Low-level HTTP details can be abstracted from during the design phase of the API, or when deciding which API to use. We argue that, in these situations, visual models of the required client–server interactions might increase developers’ efficiency and facilitate their understanding. Thus, to capture all possible interaction sequences in a given RESTful conversation, we propose RESTalk, an extension to the BPMN Choreography diagrams to render them more concise and yet sufficiently expressive in the specific REST domain. We also report on the results obtained from an exploratory survey we have conducted to assess the maturity of the field for a domain-specific language and to obtain feedback for future improvements of RESTalk.

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Notes

  1. http://www.programmableweb.com/protocol-api.

  2. http://raml.org.

  3. http://swagger.io.

  4. https://apiblueprint.org.

  5. https://www.mashape.com.

  6. This article includes and extends the work that the authors have presented at the 9th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2015) under the title “Modeling RESTful Conversations with Extended BPMN Choreography Diagrams” [33].

  7. http://restfulconversations.limequery.com.

  8. Since the questions were not mandatory a few industry participants did not answer all of them.

  9. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonglacier/latest/dev/job-operations.html.

  10. N/A stands for persons who did not use any notation before and thus could not make the comparison.

  11. http://www.w3.org/2005/12/wscwg-charter.html.

  12. http://support.doodle.com/customer/en/portal/articles/664212-doodle-wizard-api.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the participants in the survey and the anonymous reviewers for their time and valuable feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. USI, Lugano, Switzerland

    Ana Ivanchikj & Cesare Pautasso

  2. innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Monheim, Germany

    Silvia Schreier

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  1. Ana Ivanchikj
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  2. Cesare Pautasso
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  3. Silvia Schreier
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Correspondence to Ana Ivanchikj.

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Communicated by Prof. Antonio Vallecillo.

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Ivanchikj, A., Pautasso, C. & Schreier, S. Visual modeling of RESTful conversations with RESTalk. Softw Syst Model 17, 1031–1051 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0532-2

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