A tool to improve code‐first Web services discoverability through text mining techniques

Abstract

SummaryService‐oriented development is challenging mainly because Web service developers tend to disregard the importance of the exposed service APIs, which are specified using Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents. Methodologically, WSDL documents can be either manually generated or inferred from service implementations using WSDL generation tools. The latter option, called code first, is the most used approach in the industry. However, it is known that there are some bad practices in service implementations or defects in WSDL generation tools that may cause WSDL documents to present WSDL anti‐patterns, which in turn compromise the chances of documents of being discovered and understood. In this paper, we present a software tool that assists developers in obtaining WSDL documents with as few WSDL anti‐patterns as possible. The tool combines text mining and meta‐programming techniques to process service implementations and is developed as an Eclipse plug‐in. An evaluation of the tool by using a data‐set of real service implementations in terms of anti‐pattern avoidance accuracy and discovery performance by using classical Information Retrieval metrics—Precision‐at‐n, Recall and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain—is also reported.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A systematic literature review on the detection of smells and their evolution in object‐oriented and service‐oriented systems

“…However, services used by the clients are also embedded using classes and methods; thus, there is a need to study the evolution of smells in OO and SO. Moreover, SO systems can be implemented by using various technologies, and there are different tools, eg, Java2WSDL, used to generate a representation of services from OO code . SOAP services can be implemented using the code‐first or contract‐first approach, and OO source code metrics can be reused to detect antipatterns for the code‐first approach.…”

“…A number of studies reported antipatterns and code smells in different types of services, eg, antipatterns in SOAP services and WSDL (Web Service Description Language) interfaces, in REST, and in SCA (Service Component Architecture) . The data sets used in these studies for their experimental validations relied on OO code.…”

“…The data sets used in these studies for their experimental validations relied on OO code. In addition, the studies performed by Mateos et al use contract‐first and code‐first techniques for the detection of smells from the Web service registries.…”

Lightweight Semantic based Approach to Assess Readability of Web Service Interfaces

“…As we pointed out in Section 3.1, domain-specific ontologies are difficult to specify in order to be truly useful [12]. This is the case with the experiment in the extended ontology-based approach [38].…”

“…[11]. However, domain-specific ontologies are often avoided in real life applications because they are difficult to specify [12]. Thereby, the lack of complete and relevant domain-specific ontologies hinders the applicability of ontology-based approaches in practice [13,14].…”