DRWSC — To simplify dynamic invocation for RESTful Web services

Dynamic invocation has always been a hot issue in Web services in order to take full advantage of the flexibility of services computing. One key underlying enabling technology is a self-descriptive contact between the service consumer and provider. In the SOAP-based environment, WSDL has been proven a successful description language which is widely accepted. But for many years, we cannot get the equivalent in the RESTful, another dominant style of Web services. Thanks for the announcement of WSDL 2.0 which has been designed with RESTful Web service in mind and became a recommend in 2007, developers can use it as the APIs for RESTful Web services which are attracting more and more attention of Web applications all over the world. Unfortunately, the vision is almost unfulfilled due to rare reference implementations. To fill the gap between the vision and practice, we present a useful tool for dynamically invoking RESTful Web services based on the information extracted from WSDL 2.0. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility that dynamic invocations in general RESTful Web services can be done as easy as in SOAP-based ones.