The EasySOC Project: A Rich Catalog of Best Practices for Developing Web Service Applications

JUAN MANUEL RODRIGUEZ; MARCO CRASSO; CRISTIAN MATEOS; ALEJANDRO ZUNINO; MARCELO CAMPO

Antofagasta, Chile

Conferencia; XXIX International Conference of the Chilean Computer Society; 2010

The Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has recently gained a lot of attention in the software industry since represents a novel and a fresh way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is mostly materialized via Web Services, which allows developers to structure applications as building blocks exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. In this paper, we present the EasySOC project, a set of guidelines to simplify the development of service-oriented applications and services. EasySOC is a synthesized catalog of best SOC development practices that arises as a result of several years of research in fundamental SOC-related topics, namely WSDL-based technical pecification, Web Service discovery and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a software materialization of these guidelines for the Java language, which has been implemented as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines, the empirical evidence that supports them, and the availability of IDE support that enforces them may help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications.