"How Can I Be of Service?"—A Comprehensive Analysis of Web Service Integration Practices

Despite the widespread adoption of Web services in modern computing applications, there remains a lack of a systematic approach that can guide service developers in creating appealing services. This paper addresses this gap by presenting findings from a comprehensive study of RapidAPI web services, the largest service marketplace, and their integration into GitHub-hosted applications. We collected data on over 16K RapidAPI services and 19K corresponding GitHub repositories invoking these services, evaluating each service based on metrics such as latency, reliability, pricing, community support, and provider support. Our analysis examines how these metrics influence service popularity and usage patterns on GitHub. We manually analyzed 800 GitHub repositories and identified developers' service selection preferences and integration patterns, considering alternative services and their features. Additionally, we classified GitHub developers based on proficiency levels to understand how developers' levels of proficiency impact their service selection and integration strategies. Our findings offer insights for service marketplaces to recommend integration-friendly services and for service developers to create offerings tailored to real-world application needs.