scholarly journals A Comparative Analysis of the Use of GitHub by Librarians and Non-Librarians

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Mark Edward Eaton
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Comparison Group ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Work Sharing ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Library Profession ◽  
Programming Interfaces

Abstract Objective – GitHub is a popular tool that allows software developers to collaborate and share their code on the web. Librarians have adopted GitHub to support their own work, sharing code in support of their libraries. This paper asks: How does librarians’ use of GitHub compare to that of other users? Methods – To retrieve quantitative data on GitHub users, we queried the GitHub APIs (application programming interfaces). By assembling data on librarians’ use of GitHub, as well as on a comparison group, we provided preliminary comparisons of these two samples. We analyzed and visualized this data across a number of variables to offer salient insights as to how librarians compare to randomly selected GitHub users. Results – Librarians regularly use a more diverse range of programming languages than the comparison group, hinting at a broad range of possible uses of code in libraries. While the librarians’ sample group did not demonstrate statistically significant differences from the comparison group on most measures of activity and popularity, they scored significantly higher in reach and productivity than the comparison group. This could be due to librarians’ greater longevity on GitHub, as well as their greater investment in GitHub as a tool for sharing. Conclusion – Our data suggest that librarians are actively building their libraries with code and sharing the results. While it was unclear whether librarians were more active or popular on GitHub than the comparison group, it was clear that they demonstrated statistically significant outperformance in terms of reach and productivity. To explain these findings, we hypothesized that librarians’ embrace of GitHub is in line with widely held values of “openness” in the library profession.

scholarly journals Bitcoin’s APIs in Open-Source Projects: Security Usability Evaluation

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 1077
Author(s):  
Philipp Tschannen ◽  
Ali Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Programming Languages ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Usable Security ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Security Vulnerabilities ◽  
Software Applications ◽  
Current State ◽  
Digital Money ◽  
Application Programming

Given the current state of software development, it does not seem that we are nowhere near vulnerability-free software applications, due to many reasons, and software developers are one of them. Insecure coding practices, the complexity of the task in hand, and usability issues, amongst other reasons, make it hard on software developers to maintain secure code. When it comes to cryptographic currencies, the need for assuring security is inevitable. For example, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer software system that is primarily used as digital money. There exist many software libraries supporting various programming languages that allow access to the Bitcoin system via an Application Programming Interface (API). APIs that are inappropriately used would lead to security vulnerabilities, which are hard to discover, resulting in many zero-day exploits. Making APIs usable is, therefore, an essential aspect related to the quality and robustness of the software. This paper surveys the general academic literature concerning API usability and usable security. Furthermore, it evaluates the API usability of Libbitcoin, a well-known C++ implementation of the Bitcoin system, and assesses how the findings of this evaluation could affect the applications that use Libbitcoin. For that purpose, the paper proposes two static analysis tools to further investigate the use of Libbitcoin APIs in open-source projects from a security usability perspective. The findings of this research have improved Libbitcoin in many places, as will be shown in this paper.

A Systematic Review of API Evolution Literature

2022 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Maxime Lamothe ◽  
Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc ◽  
Weiyi Shang
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Publication Trends ◽  
Current State ◽  
Software Artifact ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Programming Interfaces

Recent software advances have led to an expansion of the development and usage of application programming interfaces (APIs). From millions of Android packages (APKs) available on Google Store to millions of open-source packages available in Maven, PyPI, and npm, APIs have become an integral part of software development. Like any software artifact, software APIs evolve and suffer from this evolution. Prior research has uncovered many challenges to the development, usage, and evolution of APIs. While some challenges have been studied and solved, many remain. These challenges are scattered in the literature, which hides advances and cloaks the remaining challenges. In this systematic literature review on APIs and API evolution, we uncover and describe publication trends and trending topics. We compile common research goals, evaluation methods, metrics, and subjects. We summarize the current state-of-the-art and outline known existing challenges as well as new challenges uncovered during this review. We conclude that the main remaining challenges related to APIs and API evolution are (1) automatically identifying and leveraging factors that drive API changes, (2) creating and using uniform benchmarks for research evaluation, and (3) understanding the impact of API evolution on API developers and users with respect to various programming languages.

scholarly journals Addressing Semantics Standards for Cloud Portability and Interoperability in Multi Cloud Environment

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Chithambaramani Ramalingam ◽  
Prakash Mohan
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Cloud Service ◽  
Cloud Services ◽  
Cloud Environment ◽  
Cloud Service Providers ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
Programming Interfaces ◽  
Multi Cloud

The increasing demand for cloud computing has shifted business toward a huge demand for cloud services, which offer platform, software, and infrastructure for the day-to-day use of cloud consumers. Numerous new cloud service providers have been introduced to the market with unique features that assist service developers collaborate and migrate services among multiple cloud service providers to address the varying requirements of cloud consumers. Many interfaces and proprietary application programming interfaces (API) are available for migration and collaboration services among cloud providers, but lack standardization efforts. The target of the research work was to summarize the issues involved in semantic cloud portability and interoperability in the multi-cloud environment and define the standardization effort imminently needed for migrating and collaborating services in the multi-cloud environment.

Evaluating the Current State of Application Programming Interfaces for Verifiable Credentials

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikesh Lalchandani ◽  
Frank Jiang ◽  
Jongkil Jay Jeong ◽  
Yevhen Zolotavkin ◽  
Robin Doss
Keyword(s):  
Application Programming Interfaces ◽  
Current State ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Programming Interfaces

scholarly journals European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) as a Use Case for a Collection Descriptions Standard

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharif Islam
Keyword(s):  
Data Model ◽  
User Requirements ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Current Development ◽  
Heterogeneous Datasets ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Data Elements ◽  
Programming Interfaces ◽  
Improve Access ◽  
Insight Into

The European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) is an e-service in development designed to improve access to natural history collections across Europe. Bringing together heterogeneous datasets about institutions, people, collections and specimens, ELViS will provide an e-service (with application programming interfaces (APIs) and portal) that handles various stages of collections-based research. One of the main functionalities of ELViS is to facilitate loan and visit requests related to collections. To facilitate activities such as searching for collections, requesting loans, generating reports on collection usage, and ensuring interoperability with existing and new systems and services, ELViS must use a standard way of describing collections. In this talk, I show how ELViS can use the Collection Descriptions (CD) standard currently being developed by the CD Task Group at TDWG. I will provide a brief introduction to ELViS, summarise the current development efforts, and show how the Collection Description standard can support specific user requirements (gathered via an extensive set of user stories). I will also provide insight into the data elements within ELViS (see Fig. 1) and how they relate to the Collection Description data model.

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