Client and server verification for web services using interface grammars

Abstract

Web services provide a promising framework for developing interoperable software components that interact with each other across organizational boundaries. For this framework to be successful, the client and the server for a service have to interact with each other based on the published service interface specification. If either the client or the server deviate from the interface specification, the client-server interaction will lead to errors. We present a framework for checking interface conformance for web services. Given an interface specification, we automatically generate web service server stubs (for client verification) and drivers (for server verification) and then use these stubs and drivers to check the conformance of the client and server to the interface specification. We implemented this framework by using interface grammars as the interface specification language. We developed an interface compiler that automatically generates a stub or a driver from a given interface grammar. We conducted a case study by applying these techniques to the Amazon E-Commerce Service.