Test-based Interoperability Certification for Web Services

Web Services are designed with the key goal of providing interoperable application-to-application interaction, regardless of the platforms involved. Although experience shows that interoperability is difficult to achieve, developers still have limited tools to assess the interoperability of their services and, to the best of our knowledge, none able to support end-to-end interoperability certification. In this paper, we lay the foundations of an interoperability certification process for web services, which allows testing the interoperability level of a given web service and also identifying possible interoperability issues. In practice, the process can be used by developers or providers to certify a given web service for interoperability, ensuring successful interaction with client-side platforms. We show the effectiveness of the process by conducting a large experimental evaluation to certify five different implementations of the services specified by the TPC-App benchmark, and about 2500 synthetic generated services.