Applying REST principles on local client-side APIs
Abstract: Abstract In this thesis, the application of REST principles on local clientside APIs is explored. REST is a popular software architectural style designed with simplicity, scalability and generality in mind. The benefits and drawbacks of using REST over conventional styles of designing local APIs have been investigated, with a specific focus on libspotify. Libspotify is a C API that allows third-party developers to use Spotify’s music streaming service. A local REST API was implemented on top of the libspotify C API. Software metrics were applied to the APIs, showing that the implementation was less decoupled than the equivalent C API. The metric results and relevant previous studies were used to analyze REST in local APIs. The main benefit was found to be the decoupling, leading to better evolvabilityand maintainability of an API. The main drawback is the additional work needed to model a REST API, and to make it more user friendly. The conclusion is that libspotify can benefit from REST, but that it might require more work than designing a conventional local API.
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