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Archive / INF Seminars / INF_2023_04_27_Souhaila_Serbout

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	What about Web APIs versioning?

Chair: Aron Fiechter

Thursday

27.04

USI Campus Est, room D0.03, Sector D // Online

16:30 - 17:30


	Souhaila Serbout Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract:
The lack of centralized management systems in web APIs makes it difficult for developers to store and retrieve previous versions of the API. This, along with the fact that web APIs are typically hosted on the provider’s servers, raises concerns about the consistency of versioning practices.
To explore current versioning practices, this seminar will discuss established approaches to Web API versioning and present findings from our own extensive analysis of real-world APIs. In particular, we observed how frequently different versioning schemes have been adopted for identifying both stable and preview API releases (e.g., simple version counters, semantic versioning, release timestamps). We further study the stability of versioning schemes during APIs evolution. We also detected APIs which offer dynamic access to versioning metadata through dedicated endpoints as well as APIs which support clients expecting to reach up to 14 different version of the same API at the same time.

Biography:
Souhaila Serbout is presently a Ph.D. candidate affiliated with the Design and Web Information Systems Engineering research group at the Software Institute of USI Lugano, Switzerland, and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Cesare Pautasso. She obtained a Master’s degree in New Technologies of Informatics from the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Murcia, Spain, in 2019, and a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes in Rabat, Morocco, in 2018. Her current research involves conducting a comprehensive analysis of the recent proliferation of web APIs to identify inconsistencies between developers’ expectations and real-world API designs. Additionally, she strives to identify prevalent practices and patterns that can establish a basis for designing future APIs and contribute to opening avenues for further research discussions.

To join online click here: https://tinyurl.com/22r2p4us