An approach to improve code-first web services discoverability at development time

Abstract

Previous efforts towards simplifying Web Service discovery have shown that avoiding some well-known WSDL specification antipatterns yield quite good results in making more discoverable services. The anti-patterns, however, have been studied with contractfirst Web Services, a service construction methodology that is much less popular in the software industry compared to code-first. We study a number of source code refactorings that can be applied at service development time to reduce the presence of anti-patterns in code-first WSDL documents. The cornerstone of these refactorings is a statistical correlation between common object-oriented (OO) metrics and the anti-patterns computed by using a data-set of real Web Services. We quantify the impact of the refactorings on Web Service discovery and show that more clear WSDL documents are generated and service discovery is greatly improved.