Application Programming Interface Framework Research Articles

NaijaCovidAPI: an application programming interface for retrieval of COVID19 data from the Nigerian Center for Disease Control web platform

Background: In this work, a COVID19 Application Programming Interface (API) was built using the Representational State Transfer (REST) API architecture and it is designed to fetch data daily from the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) website. Methods: The API is developed using ASP.NET Core Web API framework using C# programming language and Visual Studio 2019 as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The application has been deployed to Microsoft Azure as the cloud hosting platform and to successfully get new data from the NCDC website using Hangfire where a job has been scheduled to run every 12:30 pm (GMT + 1) and load the fetched data into our database. Various API Endpoints are defined to interact with the system and get data as needed, data can be fetched from a single state by name, all states on a particular day or over a range of days, etc. Results: The results from the data showed that Lagos and Abuja FCT in Nigeria were the hardest-hit states in terms of Total Confirmed cases while Lagos and Edo states had the highest death causalities with 465 and 186 as of August 2020. This analysis and many more can be easily made as a result of this API we have created that warehouses all COVID19 Data as presented by the NCDC since the first contracted case on February 29, 2020. This system was tested on the BlazeMeter platform, and it had an average of 11Hits/s with a response time of 2905milliseconds. Conclusions: The extension of NaijaCovidAPI over existing COVID19 APIs for Nigeria is the access and retrieval of previous data. Our contribution to the body of knowledge is the creation of a data hub for Nigeria's COVID-19 incidence from February 29, 2020, to date

Emerging Perspectives of Application Programming Interface Strategy: A Framework to Respond to Business Concerns

Software specialists increasingly find themselves in situations where their application programming interface (API)-related decisions have implications on software business. We present a strategic API framework to aid in consideration of business concerns when designing, updating, or maintaining APIs.

QresFEP: An Automated Protocol for Free Energy Calculations of Protein Mutations in Q.

Predicting the effect of single-point mutations on protein stability or protein-ligand binding is a major challenge in computational biology. Free energy calculations constitute the most rigorous approach to this problem, though the estimation of converged values for amino acid mutations remains challenging. To overcome this limitation, we developed tailored protocols to calculate free energy shifts associated with single-point mutations. We herein describe the QresFEP protocol, which includes an extension of our recent protocols to cover all amino acids mutations, based on the latest versions of the OPLS-AA force field. QresFEP is implemented in an application programming interface framework and the graphic interface QGui, for the molecular dynamics software Q. The complete protocol is benchmarked in several model systems, optimizing a number of sampling parameters and the implementation of Zwanzig's exponential formula and Bennet's acceptance ratio methods. QresFEP shows an excellent performance on estimating the hydration free energies of amino acid side-chain mimics, including their charged analogues. We also examined its performance on a protein-ligand binding problem of pharmaceutical relevance, the antagonism of neuropeptide Y1 G protein-coupled receptor. Here, the calculations show very good agreement with the experimental effect of 16 mutations on the binding of antagonists BIBP3226, in line with our recent applications in this field. Finally, the characterization of 43 mutations of T4-lysozyme reveals the capacity of our protocol to assess variations of the thermal stability of proteins, achieving a similar performance to alternative free energy perturbation (FEP) approaches. In summary, QresFEP is a robust, versatile, and user-friendly computational FEP protocol to examine biochemical effects of single-point mutations with high accuracy.