REST, GraphQL, and GraphQL Wrapper APIs Evaluation. A Computational Laboratory Experiment

Abstract

This research studies the effects of development architectures on the quality of APIs by conducting a computational laboratory experiment comparing the performance efficiency of a GraphQL API, a REST API, and a GraphQL API that wraps a REST API. Open data from the Electronic Chamber of Commerce of Ecuador, part of a national e-commerce research project, was used. To characterize quality, we used ISO/IEC 25,023 metrics in different use cases of e-commerce data consumption and insertion. Finally, we statistically analyzed the experiment results, which indicate a difference in quality between the REST API, the GraphQL API, and the GraphQL API (wrapper); this being the case, the GraphQL API performs more efficiently.