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

Abstract


 
 
 The Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has gained a lot of attention in the software in- dustry since SOC represents a novel way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is mostly materialized via Web Services, which allow developers to expose their application as building blocks for other applications by defining a clear and public interface. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. We present the EasySOC project: a catalog of guidelines to build service-oriented applications and services. This catalog synthesizes best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental SOC-related topics, namely WSDL-based technical specification, Web Service discovery and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that has been implemented to simplify the utilization of the guidelines. We believe that the practical nature of the guidelines, the empirical evidence that supports them, and the availability of IDE-integrated tools that enforces them will help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications.
 
 

Detecting WSDL bad practices in code-first Web Services

“…For instance, in Rodriguez et al (2010a), the authors state that "There is no silver bullet to guarantee that potential consumers of a Web Service will effectively discover, understand and access it. However, we have empirically shown that a WSDL document can be improved to simultaneously address these issues by following six steps.…”

“…The work of Rodriguez et al (2010d) presents the catalogue of WSDL discoverability anti-patterns, while in Rodriguez et al (2010a) the authors introduce guidelines to remedy the anti-patterns. Such guidelines are based on refactoring actions for WSDL documents.…”

“…In this sense, as far as we know there has been a unique attempt to integrally study common bad practices or anti-patterns found in public WSDL documents, which instead serves as guidelines, service providers should take into account when specifying service contracts to obtain clear, discoverable services (Rodriguez et al, 2010a). A requirement inherent to applying these guidelines is that services are mostly built in a contract-first manner, a method that encourages designers to first derive the WSDL contract of a service and then supply an implementation for it.…”

“…A requirement inherent to applying these guidelines is that services are mostly built in a contract-first manner, a method that encourages designers to first derive the WSDL contract of a service and then supply an implementation for it. Then, Rodriguez et al (2010a) help providers in detecting and removing anti-patterns. However, the most used approach to build Web Services by the industry is code-first, which means that one first implements a service and then generates the corresponding service contract by automatically extracting and deriving the interface from the implemented code.…”