Combining Web Services and Grid Services: Practical Approaches and Implications to Resource Discovery

Abstract

Web technologies have played a significant role in supporting the global sharing of Internet resources and thereby improving communications. On another front, Grids hold the promise to provide global interoperability and interconnectivity at a level considered impossible a few decades ago. In practice, there is not much difference between the existing Grid and Web infrastructures; in fact, a Grid infrastructure could be built by making minor modifications to a Web infrastructure. The implementation of Web-based Grids or a partially-Gridified Web is one of the potential solutions to Grid infrastructure problems. This can be done by sharing Grid services across the Grid infrastructure, effectively using the underlying Web services as vehicles or transporters of these services. The chapter discusses Grid services as another type of Grid resources, examines possible ways to integrate Grid services and Web services, and explores how this will support Grid resource discovery. It is argued that Grids should be developed using the underlying Web infrastructure and Grid services could be integrated with Web services using inheritance techniques to produce Grid-supported Web services. Furthermore, this approach seems to deal effectively with the problems of resource discovery in such partially-Gridified Web environments. An earlier version of this work has been presented in (Naseer, & Stergioulas, 2006a)