The EasySOC Project: A Rich Catalog of Best Practices for Developing Web Service Applications

The Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has gained a lot of attention in the software industry since represents a novel way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is mostly materialized via Web Services, which allows developers to structure applications as building blocks exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. We present the Easy SOC project, a catalog of guidelines to build service-oriented applications and services. This catalog synthesizes best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental SOC-related topics, namely WSDL-based technical specification, Web Service discovery and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that has been implemented to simplify the utilization of the guidelines. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines, the empirical evidence that supports them, and the availability of IDE support that enforces them will help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications.