Assisting developers to build high-quality code-first web service APIs
Juan Manuel Roriguez, Cristian Mateos, Alejandro Zunino · Journal of Web Engineering · 2015
Searching and understanding Web Services is challenging mainly because service developers tend to disregard the importance of the exposed service APIs. In many situations these APIs are defined using WSDL documents, which are written in an XML dialect. Service developers can opt between manually writing these documents or inferring them from service implementations. This work is focused on the later methodology and provides techniques and tools for generating WSDL documents avoiding wellknown bad practices (e.g., lack of textual comments or representative names) that compromise Web Service API quality. Our experiments show that by using our approach the obtained WSDL documents are more likely to be free from these undesirable practices so they better describe service functionality. In addition, these experiments show that the WSDL documents generated using our approach also have other important quality-related features, such as less redundant data-type definitions and better defined data-types. Experiments have been performed by comparing our proposal against WSDL generation tools/approaches from both the industry and the academy.