Web Services: Technology Issues and Foundations

Abstract

Unlike traditional applications, which depend upon a tight interconnection of all program elements, Web service applications are composed of loosely coupled, autonomous and independent services published on the Web. In this chapter, we first introduces the concept of service oriented computing (SOC) on the Web and the current standards enabling the definition and publication of Web services. This technology’s next evolution is to facilitate the creation and maintenance of Web applications. This can be achieved by exploiting the self-descriptive nature of Web services combined with more powerful models and languages for composing Web services. A second objective of this chapter is to illustrate the complexity of the Web service composition problem and to provide a representative overview of the existing approaches. The chapter concludes with a short presentation of two research projects exploiting and extending the Web service paradigm.