Comparative evaluation of the maintainability of RESTful and SOAP-WSDL web services

Web services not only are one of the most promising technologies in terms of the availability of network services but also solve the problem of integrating heterogeneous applications on the web. Because of their increasing popularity, maintainability has become an important issue as it helps to reduce maintenance costs and improve software quality. However, from the perspective of evolution and maintenance, there are many issues to be examined. This paper describes a controlled experiment to compare RESTful and SOAP-WSDL web services in terms of specific modifiability sub-characteristics and time spent on web services maintenance. The findings indicate that RESTful web services are more maintainable on the server-side, while SOAP-WSDL web services are more maintainable on the client-side. Studies based on controlled experiments are promising and may help reduce the maintenance costs of web services as well as improve the quality of software-oriented services.