A Link Generator for Increasing the Utility of OpenAPI-to-GraphQL Translations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source Link Generator tool that enhances OpenAPI-to-GraphQL translations by automatically adding links, addressing schema translation challenges, and improving migration utility for REST APIs.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Link Generator tool that analyzes OpenAPI documents and automatically adds links to improve GraphQL translation, supported by an empirical evaluation.

Findings

Addresses schema translation challenges in OpenAPI-to-GraphQL conversion

Automatically adds links to OpenAPI documents to improve translation utility

Benefits approximately 34% of APIs in the APIs.guru directory

Abstract

Standardized interfaces are the connecting link of today's distributed systems, facilitating access to data services in the cloud. REST APIs have been prevalent over the last years, despite several issues like over- and underfetching of resources. GraphQL enjoys rapid adoption, resolving these problems by using statically typed queries. However, the redevelopment of services to the new paradigm is costly. Therefore, several approaches for the successive migration from REST to GraphQL have been proposed, many leveraging OpenAPI service descriptions. In this article, we present the findings of our empirical evaluation on the APIs.guru directory and identify several schema translation challenges. These include less expressive schema types in GraphQL, as well as missing meta information about related resources in OpenAPI. To this end, we developed the open source Link Generator, that analyzes OpenAPI documents and automatically adds links to increase translation utility. This fundamentally benefits around 34% of APIs in the APIs.guru directory. Our findings and tool support contribute to the ongoing discussion about the migration of REST APIs to GraphQL, and provide developers with valuable insights into common pitfalls, to reduce friction during API transformation.