Runtime Verification of Web Service Interface Contracts

Hallé, Stéphane; Bultan, Tevfik; Hughes, Graham; Alkhalaf, Muath; Villemaire, Roger

doi:10.1109/mc.2010.76

Cited by 49 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…A widely-adopted strategy [7] by developers to build correct client applications is to first read through the service documentation, trying to memorize the constraints, and then develop client applications accordingly. However, conformance to constraints cannot be assured.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring dependency constraints on parameters for web services

Liang

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web

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Recently many popular websites such as Twitter and Flickr expose their data through web service APIs, enabling third-party organizations to develop client applications that provide functionalities beyond what the original websites offer. These client applications should follow certain constraints in order to correctly interact with the web services. One common type of such constraints is Dependency Constraints on Parameters. Given a web service operation O and its parameters Pi, Pj,…, these constraints describe the requirement on one parameter Pi that is dependent on the conditions of some other parameter(s) Pj. For example, when requesting the Twitter operation "GET statuses/user_timeline", a user_id parameter must be provided if a screen_name parameter is not provided. Violations of such constraints can cause fatal errors or incorrect results in the client applications. However, these constraints are often not formally specified and thus not available for automatic verification of client applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, called INDICATOR, to automatically infer dependency constraints on parameters for web services, via a hybrid analysis of heterogeneous web service artifacts, including the service documentation, the service SDKs, and the web services themselves. To evaluate our approach, we applied INDICA-TOR to infer dependency constraints for four popular web services. The results showed that INDICATOR effectively infers constraints with an average precision of 94.4% and recall of 95.5%.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring dependency constraints on parameters for web services

Liang

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web

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“…To our knowledge, the only existing work involving interface descriptions for Ajax communication is that by Hallé et al [16]. They propose a contract language based on interface grammars, linear temporal logic, and XPath expressions for specifying the order of HTTP interactions that exchange XML data in long-running sessions.…”

Section: Interface Descriptions For Separation Of Concernsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16 The interface descriptions for those web services are only made available as online documentation for programmers, not using any interface description language, which makes them less accessible to, for example, automated testing tools.…”

Section: Interface Descriptions For Separation Of Concernsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our results show that (1) by using the descriptions, Artemis can obtain as good coverage with the mock server as with real servers and manually populated databases and (2) the learning algorithm is capable of producing useful AIL descriptions. Testing Ajax applications is recognized as a difficult problem [20,22] and interface descriptions have proven useful for testing classical web applications [1,[15][16][17][18]21], but no previous work has combined interface descriptions and testing of Ajax applications. Related work on interface description languages, learning algorithms, and automated testing is discussed in Section 6.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Server interface descriptions for automated testing of JavaScript web applications

Jensen

Møller

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

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Automated testing of JavaScript web applications is complicated by the communication with servers. Specifically, it is difficult to test the JavaScript code in isolation from the server code and database contents. We present a practical solution to this problem. First, we demonstrate that formal server interface descriptions are useful in automated testing of JavaScript web applications for separating the concerns of the client and the server. Second, to support the construction of server interface descriptions for existing applications, we introduce an effective inference technique that learns communication patterns from sample data.By incorporating interface descriptions into the testing tool Artemis, our experimental results show that we increase the level of automation for high-coverage testing on a collection of JavaScript web applications that exchange JSON data between the clients and servers. Moreover, we demonstrate that the inference technique can quickly and accurately learn useful server interface descriptions.

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“…One approach produces a sequence diagram showing the feature [16] while the other does an analysis of dynamic call trees [17]. Halle et al have a somewhat different approach that starts from a hypothesized service contract and automatically sends a series of trial invocations to see if the service actually conforms to the hypothesis [18]. Dynamic analysis is a powerful approach to understanding a system; the main difficulty is that it is frequently impractical to gather the needed data from a large system running across multiple nodes.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Knowledge-Based System Approach for Extracting Abstractions from Service Oriented Architecture Artifacts

Goehring¹,

Reichherzer²,

El-Sheikh³

et al. 2013

IJARAI

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Abstract-Rule-based methods have traditionally been applied to develop knowledge-based systems that replicate expert performance on a deep but narrow problem domain. Knowledge engineers capture expert knowledge and encode it as a set of rules for automating the expert's reasoning process to solve problems in a variety of domains. We describe the development of a knowledge-based system approach to enhance program comprehension of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software. Our approach uses rule-based methods to automate the analysis of the set of artifacts involved in building and deploying a SOA composite application. The rules codify expert knowledge to abstract information from these artifacts to facilitate program comprehension and thus assist Software Engineers as they perform system maintenance activities. A main advantage of the knowledge-based approach is its adaptability to the heterogeneous and dynamically evolving nature of SOA environments.Keywords-expertise; rule-based system; knowledge-based system; service oriented architecture; SOA; software maintenance; search tool. I. SOA, MAINTENANCE AND THE ROLE OF EXPERTISERule-based methods have been very effective in supporting decision making in many complex domains. Can they also assist Software Engineers in dealing with the emerging complexities of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications?SOA is not a single software architecture, but rather a style for constructing complex systems, especially those that need to cross organizational boundaries. SOA systems, often called composite applications, typically resemble Fig. 1.An organization, whether governmental, non-profit, or private, finds that it needs to work with other organizations to carry out key workflows.For example fulfilling a purchase order requires getting stock from a partner company, planning employee travel involves reservations on several airlines, or providing a doctor with a patient's medical history entails assembling information from many medical records systems.As shown in Fig. 1, in a SOA architecture the software to support these workflows is organized as services having defined interfaces, running on different nodes and communicating via message passing. Some of these services will be owned and managed by the home organization but others will belong to partners or be offered by commercial vendors.Most commonly the Web Services group of standards is used to define the service interfaces and protocols [1]. In theory, these standards are supported by a broad group of providers so that services can interoperate across many different programming languages, operating systems, and data definition schemas. However, the standards have turned out to be both very complex and very loose, leading different implementers to create services and interfaces having vastly different styles.SOA composite applications began to appear at the start of the twenty first century and by now are very widespread. They have faced many technical and managerial difficulties, but perhaps none will be more ...

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Runtime Verification of Web Service Interface Contracts

Cited by 49 publications

References 12 publications

Inferring dependency constraints on parameters for web services

Inferring dependency constraints on parameters for web services

Server interface descriptions for automated testing of JavaScript web applications

A Knowledge-Based System Approach for Extracting Abstractions from Service Oriented Architecture Artifacts

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