Repository Platform for RESTful Web Services

With the growing usage of web services across the globe, demand for advanced repositories has emerged that manage web service discovery and facilitate their use by different domains. The rapid development of mobile applications and the adoption of Internet of Things technologies and serverless computing have led to the popularity of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture, a preferable approach. Due to their lightweight nature, the RESTful web services area is preferable over Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services for the development of distributed applications. Thus, new approaches for the design and development of web service repositories are needed to overcome the limitations of the current web service discovery mechanisms and consider the advanced RESTful technologies. This paper addresses such a need by proposing a repository platform for RESTful web services. It supports the validation of web service definitions against OpenAPI specification, the generation of client SDKs and server stubs, the invocation of web service operations for testing purposes and the assessment of web service availability, customer support level and rating. The architecture, functionality and validation of the platform are presented, giving insight into its features, and proving its feasibility.