SIP: A Simple Tool for Inspecting and Evaluating WSDL Specifications

Understanding a web application is not a simple task. It implies being available to interpret both their descriptions and several systems that really implement the web services. This interpreting process gathers much information and this information must be properly shown for simplifying the understanding. The descriptions of web services are an important starting point to begin to comprehend a web services. They are significant because they offer hints about the web services complexity. The web services complexity can be measured at high level abstraction considering the number of: Services, Ports, Operations, Bindings, etc. In order to carry out the task previously mentioned, the source code of web service description must be analyzed and the information must be properly displayed to the user. In this paper SIP, a Simple Inspection Tool, is described. SIP applies compilation techniques for extracting information from web services and then it computes a set of simple metrics. These metrics are used for providing an idea about web service complexity from its description. Furthermore, SIP generates visualizations based on charts, texts and source codes to help to comprehend WSDL descriptions.