Abstract 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 article 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, followers, aggregate ratings 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. We then classified GitHub developers based on proficiency levels to understand how developers’ levels of proficiency impact their service selection and integration strategies. Moreover, we examined the metrics influence for matured set of repositories by excluding those intended solely for practice purposes. 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.

Service registry, a key component of the service-oriented architecture (SOA), aids software developers in discovering services that meet specific functionality requirements. Recent years have witnessed the transition from the traditional service registries to its successor, the Service Marketplaces, which involves deeper engagement in the SOA software lifecycle and offers additional features, such as service request delegation and monitoring of services' Quality of Service (QoS). However, by analyzing developers' questions posted on online Q&A forums, we found that many developers struggle with such transition, leading to development inefficiencies and even security vulnera-bilities. This paper presents the first empirical study aimed at uncovering the issues developers face with marketplaces, particularly those arising from the transition. Through a meticulous process of manually labeling and analyzing developers' questions, we develop a taxonomy of these issues, summarize the impacts caused by the transition, and provide actionable suggestions to App developers, service providers, and marketplaces. Utilizing the labeled questions and our insights, we fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) for providing answers to similar questions raised by developers and helping service providers and marketplaces extract useful information from these questions, such as service outages and key leakages. Our evaluation of the model's performance in answering and extracting pertinent information from a set of real-world questions demonstrates its effectiveness: it accurately classified 85 % of the queries and successfully identified 88 % of service names and 77 % of key leakages. As the first empirical study in this domain, this work not only aids developers in navigating the transition more effectively but also sheds light on the under explored issue of service registry evolution, offering valuable insights for researchers.

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.