Title: The API-mashup ecosystem: a comprehensive study of ProgrammableWeb

Authors: Xinhua Guo; Hongbo Zhou; Mingdong Tang

Addresses: School of Software, Quanzhou University of Information Engineering, Quanzhou 362000, China ' School of Software, Quanzhou University of Information Engineering, Quanzhou 362000, China ' School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510006, China

Abstract: With the increasing number of open APIs on the internet, reusing them to develop value-added new applications has received enormous attention. Mashup is the most popular technique for combining APIs into new applications. Against this background, the API-mashup ecosystem composed of APIs and mashups is emerging. This paper focuses on the API-mashup ecosystem of ProgrammableWeb.com, which is the largest web API portal. Although a few studies have investigated this API-mashup ecosystem, the understandings to it are still limited. In addition, the features of the API-mashup ecosystem may change due to its continuous evolvement. Therefore, this paper reinvestigates the API-mashup ecosystem of ProgrammableWeb by exploiting the latest data. We first conduct a statistical analysis to the current API-mashup ecosystem, and then explore the relationships between APIs or API providers to build cooperation networks of them. Finally, we analyse the derived cooperation networks and uncover some important features.

Keywords: web API; mashup; network analysis; API provider.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2022.123306

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2022 Vol.15 No.2, pp.132 - 138

Received: 03 Oct 2021
Accepted: 18 Oct 2021
Published online: 08 Jun 2022 *

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