A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Early Improving Code-first Web Services Discoverability [JCR]

CRISTIAN MATEOS; MARCO CRASSO; ALEJANDRO ZUNINO; JOSÉ LUIS ORDIALES COSCIA

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COOPERATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBL CO PTE LTD

Lugar: London, UK; Año: 2015 vol. 24

0218-8430

Web Services represent a number of standard technologies and methodologies that allow developers to build applications under the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm. Within these, the WSDL language is used for representing Web Service interfaces, while code-first remains the de facto standard for building such interfaces. Previous studies with contract-first Web Services have shown that avoiding a specific catalog of bad WSDL specification practices, or anti-patterns, can reward Web Service publishers as service understandability and discoverability are considerably improved. In this paper, we study a number of simple and well-known code service refactorings that early reduce anti-pattern occurrences in WSDL documents. This relationship relies upon a statistical correlation between common OO metrics taken on a service´s code and the anti-pattern occurrences in the generated WSDL document. We quantify the effects of the refactorings -which directly modify OO metric values and indirectly alter antipattern occurrences- on service discovery. All in all, we show that by applying the studied refactorings, anti-patterns are reduced and Web Service discovery is significantly improved. For the experiments, a dataset of real-world Web Services and an academic service registry have been employed.