Web Services Management: Toward Efficient Web Data Access

Abstract

The widespread use and expansion of the World Wide Web has revolutionized the discovery, access and retrieval of information. The Internet has become the doorway to a vast information base and has leveraged the access to information through standard protocols and technologies like Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP), Web databases and Web services. Web services are software applications that are accessible over the World Wide Web through standard communication protocols. A Web service typically has a Web accessible interface for its clients at the front end, and is connected to a database system and other related application suite at the backend. Thus Web services can render efficient Web access to an information base in a secured and selective manner. The true success of this technology, however, largely depends on the efficient management of the various components forming the backbone of a Web service system. This chapter presents an overview and the state-of-the-art of various management approaches, models, and architectures for Web services systems towards achieving Quality of Service (QoS) in Web data access. Finally it discusses the importance of autonomic or self-managing systems and provides an outline of our current research on autonomic Web services.