Detecting WSDL bad practices in code-first Web Services

Abstract

Service-Oriented Computing allows software developers to structure applications as a set of standalone and reusable components called services. The common technological choice for materializing these services is Web Services, whose exposed functionality is described by using WSDL. Methodologically, Web Services are often built by first implementing their behavior and then generating the corresponding WSDLs via automatic tools. Indeed, good WSDLs designs are crucial to derive understandable and discoverable Web Services. However, the lack of control to manually specify WSDL documents and the deficiency of such WSDL generation tools usually lead to poorly described Web Services. We found that there is a high correlation between well-known object-oriented metrics taken in the code implementing a services and the occurrences of anti-patterns in their WSDLs. We show that some simple refactorings performed early when developing Web Services can greatly improve the quality of WSDL documents. Then, the contribution of this work is a practical approach to guide practitioners in obtaining better WSDL designs that align with the technologies and techniques commonly used in the industry for building services.