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

Yuhao Gu, Chunyu Chen, Jiangsu Du, Xiaoxi Zhang, Xianwei Zhang

Track: Systems and infrastructure for Web, mobile, and WoT

Keywords: WebAssembly, Web API, Query Language, Expressiveness, Runtime

TL;DR: We introduce ORFA, a framework that employs WebAssebmly as a Turing complete query language for Web API services, allowing "One Request For All operations" to eliminate data round-trips, thus reducing 18.4% traffic and 24.5% latency averagely.

Abstract:

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 under- or 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.

Submission Number: 261