Showing papers on "WS-I Basic Profile published in 2005"

Web Service Modeling Ontology

Abstract: The potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective marketplaces and eCommerce solutions has driven recent research efforts towards so-called Semantic Web Services that are enriching Web services with machine-processable semantics. To this end, the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) provides the conceptual underpinning and a formal language for semantically describing all relevant aspects of Web services in order to facilitate the automatization of discovering, combining and invoking electronic services over the Web. In this paper we describe the overall structure of WSMO by its four main elements: ontologies, which provide the terminology used by other WSMO elements, Web services, which provide access to services that, in turn, provide some value in some domain, goals that represent user desires, and mediators, which deal with interoperability problems between different WSMO elements. Along with introducing the main elements of WSMO, we provide a logical language for defining formal statements in WSMO together with some motivating examples from practical use cases which shall demonstrate the benefits of Semantic Web Services.

Web Services Platform Architecture: Soap, Wsdl, Ws-Policy, Ws-Addressing, Ws-Bpel, Ws-Reliable Messaging, and More

Abstract: "Other books claim to present the complete Web services platform architecture, but this is the first one I've seen that really does. The authors have been intimately involved in the creation of the architecture. Who better to write this book?"-Anne Thomas Manes, Vice President and Research Director, Burton Group"This is a very important book, providing a lot of technical detail and background that very few (if any) other books will be able to provide. The list of authors includes some of the top experts in the various specifications covered, and they have done an excellent job explaining the background motivation for and pertinent details of each specification. The benefit of their perspectives and collective expertise alone make the book worth reading."-Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA Technologies"Most Web services books barely cover the basics, but this book informs practitioners of the "real-world" Web services aspects that they need to know to build real applications. The authors are well-known technical leaders in the Web services community and they helped write the Web services specifications covered in this book. Anyone who wants to do serious Web services development should read this book."-Steve Vinoski, Chief Engineer, Product Innovation, IONA Technologies"There aren't many books that are as ambitious as this one is. The most notable distinguishing factor of this book is that the authors have tried to pair down the specifications for the user and rather than focusing on competing specifications, they focus on complementary ones. Nearly every chapter provides a business justification and need for each feature discussed in the Web services stack. I would recommend this book to developers, integrators, and architects."-Daniel Edgar, Systems Architect, Portland General Electric"Rarely does a project arrive with such a list of qualified and talented authors. The subject matter is timely and significant to the industry. "-Eric Newcomer, author of Understanding SOA with Web Services and Understanding Web Services and Chief Technology officer, IONAThe Insider's Guide to Building Breakthrough Services with Today'sNew Web Services PlatformUsing today's new Web services platform, you can build services that are secure, reliable, efficient at handling transactions, and well suited to your evolving service-oriented architecture. What's more, you can do all that without compromising the simplicity or interoperability that made Web services so attractive. Now, for the first time, the experts who helped define and architect this platform show you exactly how to make the most of it.Unlike other books, Web Services Platform Architecture covers the entire platform. The authors illuminate every specification that's ready for practical use, covering messaging, metadata, security, discovery, quality of service, business-process modeling, and more. Drawing on realistic examples and case studies, they present a powerfully coherent view of how all these specifications fit together-and how to combine them to solve real-world problems. Service orientation: Clarifying the business and technical value propositions Web services messaging framework: Using SOAP and WS-Addressing to deliver Web services messages WSDL: Documenting messages and supporting diverse message interactions WS-Policy: Building services that specify their requirements and capabilities, and how to interface with them UDDI: Aggregating metadata and making it easily available WS-MetadataExchange: Bootstrapping efficient, customized communication between Web services WS-Reliable Messaging: Ensuring message delivery across unreliable networks Transactions: Defining reliable interactions with WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction, and WS-BusinessActivity Security: Understanding the roles of WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, and WS-Federation BPEL: Modeling and executing business processes as service compositionsWeb Services Platform Architecture gives you an insider's view of the platform that will change the way you deliver applications. Whether you're an architect, developer, technical manager, or consultant, you'll find it indispensable.Sanjiva Weerawarana, research staff member for the component systems group at IBM Research, helps define and coordinate IBM's Web services technical strategy and activities. A member of the Apache Software Foundation, he contributed to many specifications including the SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1 specifications and built their first implementations. Francisco Curbera, IBM research staff member and component systems group manager, coauthored BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, and other specifications. He represents IBM on the BPEL and Web Services Addressing working groups. Frank Leymann directs the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems at the University of Stuttgart. As an IBM distinguished engineer, he helped architect IBM's middleware stack and define IBM's On Demand Computing strategy. IBM Fellow Tony Storey has helped lead the development of many of IBM's middleware, Web services, and grid computing products. IBM Fellow Donald F. Ferguson is chief architect and technical lead for IBM Software Group, and chairs IBM's SWG Architecture Board.© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Web Service Semantics - WSDL-S

Abstract: The current WSDL standard operates at the syntactic level and lacks the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services. Semantics can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition of Web services and enable integrating legacy applications as part of business process integration. The Web Service Semantics technical note defines a mechanism to associate semantic annotations with Web services that are described using Web Service Description Language (WSDL). It is conceptually based on, but a significant refinement in details of, the original WSDL-S proposal [WSDL-S] from the LSDIS laboratory at the University of Georgia. In this proposal, we assume that formal semantic models relevant to the services already exist. In our approach, these models are maintained outside of WSDL documents and are referenced from the WSDL document via WSDL extensibility elements. The type of semantic information that would be useful in describing a Web Service encompass the concepts defined by the semantic Web community in OWL-S [OWL-S] and other efforts [METEOR-S, WSMO]. The semantic information specified in this document includes definitions of the precondition, input, output and effects of Web service operations. This approach offers multiple advantages over OWL-S. First, users can describe, in an upwardly compatible way, both the semantics and operation level details in WSDLa language that the developer community is familiar with. Secondly, by externalizing the semantic domain models, we take an agnostic approach to ontology representation languages. This allows Web service developers to annotate their Web services with their choice of ontology language (such as UML or OWL) unlike in OWL-S. This is significant because the ability to reuse existing domain models expressed in modeling languages like UML can greatly alleviate the need to separately model semantics. Finally, it is relatively easy to update the existing tooling around WSDL specification to accommodate our incremental approach. Status This is a technical note provided for discussion purposes and to elicit feedback on approaches to adding semantics to Web services descriptions. Table of

System and method for anonymous location based services

Abstract: Provided is a fully automated web service with location based services generally involved in transmission of situational location dependent information to automatically located mobile receiving data processing systems. The web service communicates with a receiving data processing system in a manner by delivering information to the device when appropriate without the device requesting it at the time of delivery. There are varieties of configurations made by different user types of the web service for configuring information to be delivered, and for receiving the information. The web service maximizes anonymity of users, provides granular privacy control with a default of complete privacy, and supports user configurable privileges and features for desired web service behavior and interoperability. The web service is fully automated to eliminate human resources required to operate services. Integrated with the web service are enhanced location based services providing map solutions, alerts, sharing of novel services between users, and complete user control for managing heterogeneous device interoperability through the web service.

WSMX - a semantic service-oriented architecture

Abstract: Web services offer an interoperability model that abstracts from the idiosyncrasies of specific implementations; they were introduced to address the increasing need for seamless interoperability between systems in the business-to-business domain. We analyse the requirements from this domain and show that to fully address interoperability demands we need to make use of semantic descriptions of Web services. We therefore introduce the Web service execution environment (WSMX), at software system that enables the creation and execution of semantic Web services based on the Web service modelling ontology. Providers can use it to register and offer their services and requesters can use it to dynamically discover and invoke relevant services. WSMX allows a requester to discover, mediate and invoke Web services in order to carry out its tasks, based on services available on the Internet.

Automatic composition of transition-based semantic web services with messaging

Abstract: In this paper we present Colombo, a framework in which web services are characterized in terms of (i) the atomic processes (i.e., operations) they can perform; (ii) their impact on the "real world" (modeled as a relational database); (iii) their transition-based behavior; and (iv) the messages they can send and receive (from/to other web services and "human" clients). As such, Colombo combines key elements from the standards and research literature on (semantic) web services. Using Colombo, we study the problem of automatic service composition (synthesis) and devise a sound, complete and terminating algorithm for building a composite service. Specifically, the paper develops (i) a technique for handling the data, which ranges over an infinite domain, in a finite, symbolic way, and (ii) a technique to automatically synthesize composite web services, based on Propositional Dynamic Logic.

ContextUML: a UML-based modeling language for model-driven development of context-aware Web services

Abstract: Context-aware Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the electronic businesses in mobile and pervasive environments. Unfortunately, complex context-aware services are still hard to build. In this paper, we present a modeling language for the model-driven development of context-aware Web services based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Specifically, we show how UML can be used to specify information related to the design of context-aware services. We present the abstract syntax and notation of the language and illustrate its usage using an example service. Our language offers significant design flexibility that considerably simplifies the development of context-aware Web services.

Automated composition of web services by planning at the knowledge level

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of the automated composition of web services by planning on their "knowledge level" models. We start from descriptions of web services in standard process modeling and execution languages, like BPEL4WS, and automatically translate them into a planning domain that models the interactions among services at the knowledge level. This allows us to avoid the explosion of the search space due to the usually large and possibly infinite ranges of data values that are exchanged among services, and thus to scale up the applicability of state-of-the-art techniques for the automated composition of web services. We present the theoretical framework, implement it, and provide an experimental evaluation that shows the practical advantage of our approach w.r.t. techniques that are not based on a knowledgelevel representation.

Toward an agent-based and context-oriented approach for Web services composition

Abstract: This paper presents an agent-based and context-oriented approach that supports the composition of Web services. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and invoke to satisfy multiple needs. To reduce the complexity featuring the composition of Web services, two concepts are put forward, namely, software agent and context. A software agent is an autonomous entity that acts on behalf of users and the context is any relevant information that characterizes a situation. During the composition process, software agents engage in conversations with their peers to agree on the Web services that participate in this process. Conversations between agents take into account the execution context of the Web services. The security of the computing resources on which the Web services are executed constitutes another core component of the agent-based and context-oriented approach presented in this paper.

WSDL-based automatic test case generation for Web services testing

Abstract: Web services promote the specification based cooperation and collaboration among distributed applications in an open environment. To ensure the quality of the services that are published, bound, invoked and integrated at runtime, test cases have to be automatically generated and testing executed, monitored and analyzed at runtime. This paper presents the research to generate Web services test cases automatically based on the Web services specification language WSDL (Web Services Description Language), which carries the basic information of a service including its interface operations and the data transmitted. The WSDL file is first parsed and transformed into the structured DOM tree. Then, test cases are generated from two perspectives: test data generation and test operation generation. Test data are generated by analyzing the message data types according to standard XML schema syntax. Operation flows are generated based on the operation dependency analysis. Three types of dependencies are defined: input dependency, output dependency, and input/output dependency. Finally, the generated test cases are documented in XML based test files called service test specification.

Service-oriented device communications using the devices profile for web services

Abstract: This paper outlines the benefits of adopting service-oriented architectures at the level of communications between resource-constrained embedded devices. It focuses on the usage of the Devices Profile for Web Services as the underpinning of such architectures for "smart" devices and discusses an early implementation thereof. It further illustrates how "dumb" or "legacy" devices can be integrated using a gatewaying approach.

How BPEL and SOA are changing Web services development

Abstract: As the use of Web services grows, organizations are increasingly choosing the Business Process Execution Language for modeling business processes within the Web services architecture. In addition to orchestrating organizations' Web services, BPEL's strengths include asynchronous message handling, reliability, and recovery. By developing Web services with BPEL in mind, organizations can implement aspects of the service-oriented architecture that might previously have been difficult to achieve.

Tools for composite web services: a short overview

Abstract: Web services technologies enable flexible and dynamic interoperation of autonomous software and information systems. A central challenge is the development of modeling techniques and tools for eanbling the (semi-)automatic composition and analysis of these services, taking into account their semantic and behavioral properties. This paper presents an overview of the fundamental assumptions and concepts underlying current work on service composition, and provides a sampling of key results in the area. It also provides a brief tour of several composition models including semantic web services, the "Roman" model, and the Mealy / conversation model.

A service creation environment based on end to end composition of Web services

Abstract: The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus resulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insufficient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. We present the first integrated work in composing web services end to end from specification to deployment by synergistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment along with a use-case scenario, and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-to-market for new services.

Structural and semantic matching for assessing web-service similarity

Abstract: The web-services stack of standards is designed to support the reuse and interoperation of software components on the web. A critical step in the process of developing applications based on web services is service discovery, i.e. the identification of existing web services that can potentially be used in the context of a new web application. Discovery through catalog-style browsing (such as supported currently by web-service registries) is clearly insufficient. To support programmatic service discovery, we have developed a suite of methods that assess the similarity between two WSDL (Web Service Description Language) specifications based on the structure of their data types and operations and the semantics of their natural language descriptions and identifiers. Given only a textual description of the desired service, a semantic information-retrieval method can be used to identify and order the most relevant WSDL specifications based on the similarity of the element descriptions of the available specifications with the query. If a (potentially partial) specification of the desired service behavior is also available, this set of likely candidates can be further refined by a semantic structure-matching step, assessing the structural similarity of the desired vs the retrieved services and the semantic similarity of their identifiers. In this paper, we describe and experimentally evaluate our suite of service-similarity assessment methods.

Facilitating the rapid development and scalable orchestration of composite web services

Abstract: The development of new Web services through the composition of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to realise business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, given that services are often developed in an ad hoc fashion using manifold technologies and standards, connecting and coordinating them in order to build composite services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system in which services are composed using a model-driven approach, and the resulting composite services are orchestrated following a peer-to-peer paradigm. The system provides tools for specifying composite services through statecharts, data conversion rules, and multi-attribute provider selection policies. These specifications are interpreted by software components that interact in a peer-to-peer way to coordinate the execution of the composite service. We report results of an experimental evaluation showing the relative advantages of this peer-to-peer approach with respect to a centralised one.

Ensuring required failure atomicity of composite Web services

Abstract: The recent evolution of Internet, driven by the Web services technology, is extending the role of the Web from a support of information interaction to a middleware for B2B interactions.Indeed, the Web services technology allows enterprises to outsource parts of their business processes using Web services. And it also provides the opportunity to dynamically offer new value-added services through the composition of pre-existing Web services.In spite of the growing interest in Web services, current technologies are found lacking efficient transactional support for composite Web services (CSs).In this paper, we propose a transactional approach to ensure the failure atomicity, of a CS, required by partners. We use the Accepted Termination States (ATS) property as a mean to express the required failure atomicity.Partners specify their CS, mainly its control flow, and the required ATS. Then, we use a set of transactional rules to assist designers to compose a valid CS with regards to the specified ATS.

Data integration through a services oriented architecture

Abstract: Services such as product services, real-time services, and common services are deployed in a services oriented architecture. These services may, for example, be deployed for use in a variety of enterprise data integration functions.

A graph-based approach to Web services composition

Abstract: Automatic composition of Web services has drawn a great deal of attention recently. By composition, we mean taking advantage of currently existing Web services to provide a new service that does not exist on its own. Therefore, in order to have a more complex service, we can use some semantically related simpler Web services and execute them in such a way that the whole set provides the desired service. There are Web service specification languages that specify semantic properties of Web services. These languages are helpful in searching for those Web services that can participate in a composition. This work is aimed at searching among Web services in order to find those whose composition provides a specific behavior. Those Web services found after this search are incrementally composed together to build a new service that realizes that behavior. Our technique takes advantage of graph structures and also a particular formalism called interface automata.

Similarity-based Web service matchmaking

Abstract: With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, matchmaking of relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. Commonly, Web service is described by WSDL and published on UDDI registers. UDDI provides limited search facilities allowing only a keyword-based search of businesses, services, and the so called tModels based on names and identifiers. This category-based keyword-browsing method is clearly insufficient. Semantic Web service uses DAML-S instead of WSDL to represent capabilities of Web services. This improvement enables software agents or search engines to automatically find appropriate Web services via ontologies and reasoning algorithm enriched methods. However, the high cost of formally defining to the heavy and complicated services makes this improvement widespread adoption unlikely. To cope with these limitations, we have developed a suite of methods which assesses the similarity of Web services to achieve matchmaking. In particular, we present a conceptual model which classifies properties of Web services into four categories. For each category, a similarity assessment method has been given. In Web service matchmaking process, these similarity assessment methods can be used together or individually. Experiments highlight complementary contributions that our work makes to facilitate Web service matchmaking.

Ontology mapping for the interoperability problem in network management

Abstract: Interoperability between different network management domains, heterogeneous devices, and various management systems is one of the main requirements for managing complex enterprise services. While substantial advances have been made in low-level device and data interoperability using common data formats and specifications such as simple network management protocol's (SNMP's) SMI and TMF's SID, various interoperability issues including semantic interoperability offer interesting research challenges. While semantic interoperability is a difficult problem in its own right, the semantic web that incorporates intelligent agents necessitates an interoperability solution requiring agents to communicate unambiguously and reason intelligently to perform cooperative management tasks. Agents need a formal representation of knowledge; an ontology is capable of modeling the rich semantics of the managed environment (and especially, relationships between managed entities) so that agents can act on them. This paper presents an ontology-driven approach for solving the semantic interoperability problem in the management of enterprise services, illustrated here with a router configuration management application.

A snapshot of public web services

Abstract: Web Service Technology has been developing rapidly as it provides a flexible application-to-application interaction mechanism. Several ongoing research efforts focus on various aspects of web service technology, including the modeling, specification, discovery, composition and verification of web services. The approaches advocated are often conflicting---based as they are on differing expectations on the current status of web services as well as differing models of their future evolution. One way of deciding the relative relevance of the various research directions is to look at their applicability to the currently available web services. To this end, we took a snapshot of the currently publicly available web services. Our aim is to get an idea of the number, type, complexity and composability of these web services and see if this analysis provides useful information about the near-term fruitful research directions.

Thema: Byzantine-fault-tolerant middleware for Web-service applications

Abstract: Distributed applications composed of collections of Web services may call for diverse levels of reliability in different parts of the system. Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a general strategy that has recently been shown to be practical for the development of certain classes of survivable, client-server, distributed applications; however, little research has been done on incorporating it into selective parts of multi-tier, distributed applications like Web services that have heterogeneous reliability requirements. To understand the impacts of combining BFT and Web services, we have created Thema, a new BFT middleware system that extends the BFT and Web services technologies to provide a structured way to build Byzantine-fault-tolerant, survivable Web services that application developers can use like other Web services. From a reliability perspective, our enhancements are also novel in that they allow Byzantine-fault-tolerant services: (1) to support the multi-tiered requirements of Web services, and (2) to provide standardized Web services support for their own clients (through WSDL interfaces and SOAP communication). In this paper we study key architectural implications of combining BFT with Web services and provide a performance evaluation of Thema using the TPC-W benchmark.

Automated model checking and testing for composite Web services

Abstract: Web services form a new distributed computing paradigm. Collaborative verification and validation are important when Web services from different vendors are integrated together to carry out a coherent task. This paper presents a new approach to verify Web services by model checking the process model of OWL-S (Web ontology language for Web services) and to validate them by the test cases automatically generated in the model checking process. We extend the BLAST, a model checker that handles control flow model naturally, to handle the concurrency in OWL-S. We also propose enhancement in OWL-S and PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) to facilitate the automated test case generation. Experiments on realistic examples are provided to illustrate the process.

Web Service Grids: an evolutionary approach

Abstract: The UK e-Science Programme is a £250M, 5 year initiative which has funded over 100 projects. These application-led projects are under-pinned by an emerging set of core middleware services that allow the coordinated, collaborative use of distributed resources. This set of middleware services runs on top of the research network and beneath the applications we call the ‘Grid’. Grid middleware is currently in transition from pre-Web Service versions to a new version based on Web Services. Unfortunately, only a very basic set of Web Services embodied in the Web Services Interoperability proposal, WS-I, are agreed by most IT companies. IBM and others have submitted proposals for Web Services for Grids - the Web Services ResourceFramework and Web Services Notification specifications - to the OASIS organisation for standardisation. This process could take up to 12 months from March 2004 and the specifications are subject to debate and potentially significant changes. Since several significant UK e-Science projects come to an end before the end of this process, the UK therefore needs to develop a strategy that will protect the UK’s investment in Grid middleware by informing the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute’s (OMII) roadmap and UK middleware repository in Southampton. This paper sets out an evolutionary roadmap that will allow us to capture generic middleware components from projects in a form that will facilitate migration or interoperability with the emerging Grid Web Services standards and with on-going OGSA developments. In this paper we therefore define a set of Web Services specifications - that we call ‘WS-I+’ to reflect the fact that this is a larger set than currently accepted by WS-I – that we believe will enable us to achieve the twin goals of capturing these components and facilitating migration to future standards. We believe that the extra Web Services specifications we have included in WS-I+ are both helpful in building e-Science Grids and likely to be widely accepted.

BioMOBY Successfully Integrates Distributed Heterogeneous Bioinformatics Web Services. The PlaNet Exemplar Case

Abstract: The burden of noninteroperability between on-line genomic resources is increasingly the rate-limiting step in large-scale genomic analysis. BioMOBY is a biological Web Service interoperability initiative that began as a retreat of representatives from the model organism database community in September, 2001. Its long-term goal is to provide a simple, extensible platform through which the myriad of on-line biological databases and analytical tools can offer their information and analytical services in a fully automated and interoperable way. Of the two branches of the larger BioMOBY project, the Web Services branch (MOBY-S) has now been deployed over several dozen data sources worldwide, revealing some significant observations about the nature of the integrative biology problem; in particular, that Web Service interoperability in the domain of bioinformatics is, unexpectedly, largely a syntactic rather than a semantic problem. That is to say, interoperability between bioinformatics Web Services can be largely achieved simply by specifying the data structures being passed between the services (syntax) even without rich specification of what those data structures mean (semantics). Thus, one barrier of the integrative problem has been overcome with a surprisingly simple solution. Here, we present a nontechnical overview of the critical components that give rise to the interoperable behaviors seen in MOBY-S and discuss an exemplar case, the PlaNet consortium, where MOBY-S has been deployed to integrate the on-line plant genome databases and analytical services provided by a European consortium of databases and data service providers.

Automatic conformance testing of web services

Abstract: Web Services are the basic building blocks of next generation Internet applications, based on dynamic service discovery and composition. Dedicated discovery services will store both syntactic and behavioral descriptions of available services and guarantee their compatibility with the requirements expressed by clients. In practice, however, interactions may still fail because the Web Service's implementation may be faulty. In fact, the client has no guarantee on the quality of the implementation associated to any service description. In this paper, we propose the idea of high-quality service discovery incorporating automatic testing for validating Web Services before allowing their registration. First, the discovery service automatically generates conformance test cases from the provided service description, then runs the test cases on the target Web Service, and only if the test is successfully passed, the service is registered. In this way, clients bind with Web Services providing a compatible signature, a suitable behavior, and a high-quality implementation.

System and methods for providing a declarative syntax for specifying SOAP-based web services

Abstract: A system and methods are provided that make compile-time declarative modeling available for SOAP-based data transmission(s). The declarative modeling minimizes the amount of coding required of a developer. The underlying details regarding the SOAP protocol, dispatching to the appropriate object and function, marshaling and un-marshaling of XML and generating the SOAP response are hidden from the developer when implementing SOAP-based Web services. The task of creating a SOAP-based web service is thus greatly simplified by reducing the number and complexity of considerations required of the developer when generating SOAP-based Web services. In one embodiment, attributes for Visual C++ are utilized as a framework for a declarative syntax for SOAP-based Web services, which Visual C++ attributes have access to type and marshaling information.

State and events for Web services: a comparison of five WS-resource framework and WS-notification implementations

Abstract: The Web services resource framework defines conventions for managing state in distributed systems based on Web services, and WS-notification defines topic-based publish/subscribe mechanisms. We analyze five independent and quite different implementations of these specifications from the perspectives of architecture, functionality, standards compliance, performance, and interoperability. We identify both commonalities among the different systems (e.g., similar dispatching and SOAP processing mechanisms) and differences (e.g., security, programming models, and performance). Our results provide insights into effective implementation approaches. Our results may also provide application developers, system architects, and deployers with guidance in identifying the right implementation for their requirements and in determining how best to use that implementation and what to expect with regard to performance and interoperability.