Refactoring code-first Web Services for early avoiding WSDL anti-patterns: Approach and comprehensive assessment

•An approach to avoid WSDL anti-patterns in code-first, Java-based Web Services.•An evaluation with modern Java to WSDL tools and registries, plus real Web Services.•Results showing that code-first Web Services are more understandable and retrievable.•Guidelines for using the approach in the industry through a cost-benefit analysis.

Previous research of our own [34] has shown that by avoiding certain bad specification practices, or WSDL anti-patterns, contract-first Web Service descriptions expressed in WSDL can be greatly improved in terms of understandability and retrievability. The former means the capability of a human discoverer to effectively reason about a Web Service functionality just by inspecting its associated WSDL description. The latter means correctly retrieving a relevant Web Service by a syntactic service registry upon a meaningful user's query. However, code-first service construction dominates in the industry due to its simplicity. This paper proposes an approach to avoid WSDL anti-patterns in code-first Web Services. We also evaluate the approach in terms of services understandability and retrievability, deeply discuss the experimental results, and delineate some guidelines to help code-first Web Service developers in dealing with the trade-offs that arise between these two dimensions. Certainly, our approach allows services to be more understandable, due to anti-pattern remotion, and retrievable as measured by classical Information Retrieval metrics.