SPEC2REST: An Approach for Eliciting Web API Resources from Existing Applications

Abstract

Web API is a modern approach for exposing service data to use for applications, however, decision on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) from an existing web application is still a manual and very time consuming task. Depending on the existing web application, thousands of lines of code has to be read and discussed to decide on what data can be exposed as web API resources. An automated approach is named SPEC2REST and proposed here for eliciting web API resources which uses class relations for path elicitation and filters web API resources using word occurrence. Evaluation results showed that SPEC2REST can elicit around 90% of actual existing web APIs for four applications by using class relations, as well as, helps inexperienced developers at their first step of creating RESTful resources.