EasySOC: Making web service outsourcing easier

Service-oriented computing has been widely recognized as a revolutionary paradigm for software development. Despite the important benefits this paradigm provides, current approaches for service-enabling applications still lead to high costs for outsourcing services with regard to two phases of the software life cycle. During the implementation phase, developers have to invest much effort into manually discovering services and then providing code to invoke them. Mostly, the outcome of the second task is software containing service-aware code, therefore it is more difficult to modify and to test during the maintenance phase. This paper describes EasySOC, an approach that aims to decrease the costs of creating and maintaining service-oriented applications. EasySOC combines text mining, machine learning, and best practices from component-based software development to allow developers to quickly discover and non-invasively invoke services. We evaluated the performance of the EasySOC discovery mechanism using 391 services. In addition, through a case study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the software technical quality achieved by employing EasySOC versus not using it.