Spotting and Removing WSDL Anti-pattern Root Causes in Code-first Web Services Using NLP Techniques: A Thorough Validation of Impact on Service Discoverability

Abstract

To expose software as Web-accesible services, Web Service technologies demand developers to implement certain sofware artifacts, such as the service description using WSDL. Therefore, developers usually use automatic tools to perform this task, which take as input a code written in a programming language –e.g. Java– and generate the necessary artifacts for invoking it remotely. However, as a result of tool flaws and some bad coding practices, the description of the resulting Web Services might contain anti-patterns that difficult their discovery and use. In earlier work we proposed a tool-supported, code-first approach named Gapidt to develop Web Services in Java while early reducing the presence of anti-patterns in their descriptions through code refactorings. Bad coding practices, which potentially reduce the textual and structural information of generated WSDL documents, are automatically detected and informed to the developer by means of the GAnalyzer module so he/she can fix the service code. Moreover, developer provided information, such as service parameter names and operation comments, as well as re-utilization of data-type definitions, are exploited by the GMapper module upon generating WSDL documents. This paper focuses on a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the approach oriented at prospective users to assess expected discoverability gains and usage considerations taking into account various relevant service publishing technologies. In addition, we introduce a detailed comparison of Gapidt with a similar approach from the literature. The results show that Gapidt outperforms its competitor in terms of discoverability while improves Web Service description quality (better documentation and data-models). The Web Service discoverability levels of Gapidt outperforms that of third-party tools, either when using the GAnalyzer plus the GMapper, or only the GMapper.