Contents I. Introduction
With the explosive growth of Web APIs and ubiquity of smartphones, the number of mobile mashup applications has surged in recent years [1]. However, there are some obstacles faced by the developers to study a large number of new APIs. After observing the Web APIs released by social networking Web sites (Facebook and Twitter), Web album Web sites (Picasa and Flickr), video sharing Web sites (YouTube and Flickr) and search engines (Google and Bing). We find that when developing mobile mashup applications, developers will face the following challenges.
Challenge 1: Diverse invocations of Web APIs The invocations of Web APIs differ from one another since many famous Web sites publish their Web APIs in their own way. Such diversity makes developers strive to learn the usage of these Web APIs and it is time-consuming when creating a new mobile mushup application. For example, the Web API to search YouTube for the videos about “Olympic” is shown in Figure 1a while the Web API to search Flickr is as shown in Figure 1b. We can observe from Figure 1a and Figure 1b that the invocations of the search APIs of YouTube and Flickr are quite different.
Challenge 2: Diverse data formats of Web API responses Data formats of the responses of Web APIs provided by different Web sites are also diverse, since there is no standard in the Web API responses. When developing a mobile mashup application using the Web APIs of various Web sites, the developers should first understand the data formats of the Web API responses and then implement several parsers to extract the information of interest from the Web API responses. For example, the number of views in the YouTube API response is stored in the field “view Count” while the number of views in the Flickr API response is stored in the field “view.” Thus, the diverse of the data formats will bring burden to developers, thereby decreasing the performance of developers.
Video Search Web APIs