Migration of SOAP-based services to RESTful services

Abstract

Web services are designed to provide rich functionality for organizations and support interoperable interactions over a network. Web services are mainly realized in two ways: 1) SOAP-based services and 2) RESTful services. For the service providers, RESTful services can improve system flexibility, scalability, and performance as compared to the SOAP-based Web services. It is equally attractive to end users as it is consume less resources (i.e., battery, processor speed, and memory). Additionally, REST-based services do not include complex standards and heterogeneous operations; and hence are easier to consume and compose as compared to SOAP-based Web services. We provide an approach to migrate SOAP-based services to RESTful services. We identify resources from a SOAP-based Web service by analyzing its service description and mapping the contained operations to resources and HTTP methods. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a case study on a set of publicly available SOAP-based Web services. The results of our case study show that our approach can achieve high accuracy of identifying RESTful services from the interfaces of SOAP-based services. Our approach can improve the performance for invoking Web services after SOAP-based services are migrated to RESTful services.