Are APIs with Poor Design Subject to Poor Lexicon? : A Google Perspective

Abstract: REST (Representational state transfer) is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. The simplicity of REST allows straightforward communication between HTTP clients and servers using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) and HTTP methods, e.g., GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. To do the communication effectively between clients and servers, there is a set of best design practices (design and linguistic patterns) shall be followed, and a set of poor design practices (design and linguistic antipatterns) shall be avoided. This study aims to determine whether there is a relationship between design and linguistic quality in Google RESTful APIs. To find this relation, a tool is developed to detect patterns and antipatterns in REST APIs both in terms of design and linguistic quality. The input of this tool is qualitative data (Google APIs) and its output is quantitative data. Using this quantitative data, a statistical study is then performed to detect the relation. The tests that are conducted to obtain the final results are Chi-squared and Phi Coefficient tests. The result of Chi-squared that considered all the groups of patterns and antipatterns shows that there is a statistically significant relation between design and linguistic quality. However, when we assess the individual pair of patterns and antipatterns, our Phi Coefficient tests show that for most of the cases, there is no or negligible relationship between linguistic and design patterns and antipatterns.