A Field Perspective on the Interoperability of Web Services

Abstract

In a typical web services environment, a web service framework supports the client and server interaction by, among other tasks, announcing the services interfaces and translating application-level service calls to SOAP messages. Although designed to support inter-operation, research and practice suggest that existing client-side and server-side frameworks, many times, cannot fully inter-operate. The problem is that, as web services are increasingly being deployed to support business-critical environments, interoperability issues may prevent or impact business transactions, potentially resulting in huge financial and reputation losses. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of the interoperability of 1024 publicly available web services, against a set of diverse and well-known clientside web service frameworks. We have detected at least one severe interoperability issue in over 53% of the services tested and quite different inter-operation capabilities regarding the client-side frameworks. Results clearly show that, although providers frequently claim interoperability capabilities, urgent improvements are required.

Web Applications and Web Services: A Comparative Study

“…These issues usually happen by misusing different types of prerequisites that are exposed by a service provider or requester environment. Therefore, it is essential for service providers to ensure that their services are accessible and usable by a variety number of service requesters (Elia et al, 2014).…”

A Practical Approach Towards Automatic Testing of Web Services Interoperability

“…We presented a tool for interoperability testing of web services in (Elia, Laranjeiro, & Vieira, 2014b). In (Elia, Laranjeiro, & Vieira, 2014c) and (Elia, Laranjeiro, & Vieira, 2014a) we have conducted experiments regarding part of the full inter-operation process (which in the end involves communication). In this paper we greatly extend the previous work, by having refined the approach and formalized key aspects, extended the approach to now include the exchange of messages between client and server, and by augmenting the tests and tool implementation to cover the approach extension and thus covering the whole interoperation process.…”