RAWS & UWAS: Reflective and Adaptable Web Services Running on the Universal Web Application Server

Abstract

Reflection is a powerful technology that allows us to produce auto-adaptable software. RAWS is a reflective, multilevel Web service architecture aimed at allowing a Web service to transform its structure and behaviour without the need of human intervention to change the source code, compile it or deploy it again on the application server. Using RAWS, the Web service can change itself automatically. Current application servers have a very important limitation: The deployment platform (J2EE, .NET, etc.). Using current servers, a Web service or application can only be deployed on a server which runs with the same technology. To solve this drawback, we have developed universal Web application server (UWAS), platform capable of deploying Web services or applications written in any object-oriented language or for any platform. This is possible thanks to the fact that UWAS internally uses a language-independent object-oriented Web server markup language (OOWSML) representation based on XML. Altogether, RAWS & UWAS make it possible to deploy a Web service on the server regardless of its implementation technology, providing the flexibility to automatically adapt or transform the Web service structure and/or behaviour.