REStalk miner: Mining REStful conversations, pattern discovery and matching

Abstract

REST has become the architectural style of choice for APIs, where clients need to instantiate a potentially lengthy sequence of requests to the server in order to achieve their goal, effectively leading to a RESTful conversation between clients and servers. Mining the logs of such RESTful conversations can facilitate knowledge sharing among API designers regarding design best practices as well as API usage and optimization. In this demo paper, we present the RESTalk Miner, which takes logs from RESTful services as an input and uses RESTalk, a domain specific language, to visualize them. It provides interactive coloring to facilitate graph reading, as well as statistics to compare the relative frequency of conversations performed by different clients. Furthermore, it supports searching for predefined patterns as well as pattern discovery.