Create a design for WebServices

I tried to find a really easy and good tool to create a design for Web-services.

Maybe I  did not spend enough time to find one, so I chose again my favorite yEd.

The yEd is a very lightweight and useful application for drawing, creating boxes with attributes, relations, colors, grouping.

The artifact of the yEd is an XML. It is very easy to modify, to maintain, to load it to the repository.

So you can create Entities with this tool, just drop it from the Entity relationship part of the Palette. You can add attributes, and you can also define relations.

What is the benefit to have a web-service design?

Firstly, you will have a documentation. You can share the current functionality, the entities. If you leave the project, the newcomer colleague can use it.

Secondly you has an overview. It is not easy to follow the XML files, where the WS is defined, and also not easy to parse the java objects, where the annotations are, which filed is the part of the XML element.

Thirdly you get a review. I found with my little WS two little thing, when it was modified, the coder forgot to follow the naming conventions. After that I found a bug in the Java objects, in the annotations. The sub entity name was different in the Entity java class, and in the parent java class. Despite of this bug the WS also worked.

An example: