An Empirical Study of Web Services Topics in Web Developer Discussions on Stack Overflow

Web Services (WSs) are gaining worldwide popularity due to reliable and fast intercommunication services for the development of web and mobile applications. WSs are provided to client application developers through web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as YouTube API, Twitter API, Facebook API, etc. Due to the popularity of WSs, the developers frequently discuss various WSs-based application’ issues on online forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO). This study aims to highlight the problems faced by client developers in the development process of WSs-based applications using the dataset of SO. The comprehension of developers’ conversations on SO can give insight into the frequency, difficulty, and popularity of different WSs-related problems of developers. We downloaded 12,746 posts from SO relevant to WSs-related issues for this article. We used the topic modeling technique (LDA) to extract various topics from the SO dataset. The topics are labeled and organized into categories and sub-categories according to relationships among them. The difficulty and popularity of each topic have been analyzed. Our investigation yield several findings. First, developers focus on six topics related to WSs on SO: Client APIs development, Data Processing, Web services Authorization, Framework Support, Web APIs, and Mobile Applications. Secondly, the advantages and disadvantages of web applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.39), from the Clients APIs development category have the highest prevalence, followed by Database (DB) and Data Processing in Applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.38) from the Data Processing category. Third, most WSs-related topics in all categories are evolving promptly on SO, i.e., new questions are added daily about WSs development, deployment, and authorization. Fourth, the questions of type “how” are primarily asked in Framework support, Client APIs development, and Web APIs categories. Although, many questions in other categories are of the kind “What”. It is also observed that WSs developers not only used SO to ask How and What types of questions but they also used SO to ask information-seeking questions (i.e., in Data processing and Client APIs development categories). Fifth, the topics relevant to Web APIs (Fused_Popularity=10.8) and Client API Development ((Fused_Popularity=9.35) categories of WSs are very popular on SO. Sixth, the questions relevant to the Web APIs (Fused_Difficulty =3) & Client APIs development (Fused_Difficulty=2.25) categories are more difficult than the other four categories. The results of our research may be helpful for the following WSs stakeholders: WSs Client application developers, WSs Educators, and WSs researchers. The WSs Educators and investigators can get more knowledge of new methods and discover novel techniques to make challenging WSs topics easy to understand. WSs framework developers can utilize our extracted WSs topics and categories to know the preferences of WSs developers that may support them in upgrading existing frameworks or developing new ones.