A Toolkit for Simplified Web-Services Programming

Abstract

The Internet has truly transformed into a global deployment and development platform. For example, Web 2.0 inspires large-scale collaboration; Social-computing empowers increased awareness; as well as Cloud-computing for virtualization of resources. As a result, developers have thus been presented with ubiquitous access to countless web-services. However, while this enables tremendous automation and re-use opportunities, new productivity challenges have also emerged: The same repetitive, error-prone and time consuming integration work needs to get done each time a developer integrates a new API. In order to address these challenges, we designed and developed ServiceBase, a “programming” knowledge-base to abstract, organize, incrementally curate and thereby re-use service-related programming-knowledge. Empowered by this knowledge we then provide: (a) A set of APIs that expose a common and high-level interface to developers for integrating services in a simplified manner; (b) An extended version of the GIT repository, creating a plug-n-play environment for services; (c) A mind-map based visualization tool to help explore the base.