Rule-Based Web Service Validation

The number of systems communicating using web services has grown exponentially over the years thanks to the service-oriented architecture they enforce. The paradigm shift encouraged system owners to re-use existing services rather than implementing them again as well as consuming third party ones cutting the development time considerably. Since the number of consumers can grow radically it is important to ensure that the exchanged data is valid. In this article we will demonstrate a way to validate and potentially correct both the request and response of web services at run-time using a semantic rule oriented approach. The solution also provides a validation method for black-box systems where the original source code is no longer available or cannot be modified. By combining validation, proxy and correction our approach provides an all-in-one solution that can be leveraged in most scenarios.