Assessing the Linguistic Design Quality of APIs of Distributed Systems and Microservices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
APIs or Application Programming Interfaces help distributed systems and microservices to expose their functionalities and serve as a means for communication among them. In contrast to a poorly designed API, a well-designed API is easy for users to understand and use. Thus, APIs with high-quality design are essential both for API providers and client developers. This paper aims to assess the linguistic design quality of APIs in distributed systems and microservices by automatically detecting good and poor design practices, commonly known as patterns and antipatterns, respectively. We rely on syntactic and semantic analyses for automatic assessment of the design quality of APIs using detection heuristics. Syntactic analysis involves analyzing the structure and syntax of the APIs, while semantic analysis involves analyzing API documentation, descriptions, and parameters. We achieved an overall accuracy of more than 93% in detecting patterns and antipatterns. Our detection results also suggest that antipatterns are prevalent in the APIs of distributed systems and microservices. Our findings will assist API developers in identifying poor design practices and improving the design quality of their APIs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".