A tool for building retrievable code-first Web Services

Although producing high quality WSDL documents is a key factor in a Web Service system success, previous works have shown that WSDL document quality, in terms of readability and discoverability, is often disregarded by service developers. One of the main causes of this is that developers do not write the WSDL documents directly. Instead, these documents are automatically generated from service implementations, which are called code-first Web Services. This work presents a novel tool for assisting Java code-first Web Service development that spots potential issues that might lead to low quality WSDL documents. The approach was empirically evaluated using 81 open-source Web Service implementations. The evaluation shows that the WSDL documents generated using our tool can be more easily retrieved from Web Service registries by users. This indirectly implies that these WSDL documents have a better quality than the ones generated using alternative tools.