ORFA: Exploring WebAssembly as a Turing Complete Query Language for Web APIs

Web APIs are the primary communication form for Web services, with RESTful design being the predominant paradigm. However, RESTful APIs are typically fixed once defined, causing data underor over-fetching as they can't meet clients' varying Web service needs. While semantic enriched API query languages like GraphQL mitigates this problem, they still face expressiveness limitations for logical operations such as indirect queries and loop traversals. To address this, we propose ORFA (One Request For All), the first in literature that employs WebAssembly (Wasm) as a Web API query language to achieve complete expressiveness of client requests. ORFA's key advantage lies in its use of Wasm's Turing completeness to allow clients to compose arbitrary operations within a single request, thus significantly eliminating redundant data transmission and boosting communication efficiency. Technically, ORFA provides a runtime for executing Wasm query programs and incorporates new module splitting strategies and a caching mechanism customized for integrating Wasm into Web API services, which can enable lightweight code transfer and fast request responses. Experimental results on a realistic testbed and popular Web applications show that ORFA effectively reduces latency by 18.4% and network traffic by 24.5% on average, compared to the state-of-the-art GraphQL. CCS Concepts • Information systems → Service discovery and interfaces; RESTful web services; • Software and its engineering → Runtime environments; API languages.