Refactoring code-first Web Services for early avoiding WSDL anti-patterns: Approach and comprehensive assessment (Indexed SCI, IF JCR 2013=0.548)

ORDIALES COSCIA, J. L.; MATEOS, C.; CRASSO, M.; ZUNINO, A.

SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2014 vol. 89 p. 374 - 407

0167-6423

Previous research of our own [34] has shown that by avoiding certain bad specification practices, or WSDL anti-patterns, contract-first Web Service descriptions expressed in WSDL can be greatly improved in terms of understandability and retrievability. The former means the capability of a human discoverer to effectively reason about a Web Service functionality just by inspecting its associated WSDL description. The latter means correctly retrieving a relevant Web Service by a syntactic service registry upon a meaningful user´s query. However, code-first service construction dominates in the industry due to its simplicity. This paper proposes an approach to avoid WSDL anti-patterns in code-first Web Services. We also evaluate the approach in terms of services understandability and retrievability, deeply discuss the experimental results, and delineate some guidelines to help code-first Web Service developers in dealing with the trade-off that arise between these two dimensions. Certainly, our approach allows services to be more understandable, due to anti-pattern remotion, and retrievable as measured by classical Information Retrieval metrics.