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Evaluation and Adaptation of Web Services

One of the main aims of Component adaptation [Szy97] is to help application developers reuse components so that they can plug-in third party components into their application. This research concentrates on this type of adaptation but in the context of Web Services. Web Services are becoming increasingly popular. Web Services often fit the requirements of being a component, and can be reused in a very similar manner. Hence there is a requirement for adaptation of Web Services just as there is the need for adaptation of software components. There are now quite a few adaptation techniques, but few of them have identified adaptation techniques for Web Services. This approach to adaptation allows for the modification of data and behaviour of existing Web Services. The approach to adaptation uses eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation applied to the message passed between Web Services. These messages are commonly in XML format, hence XSL can be used to modify them. The application of the transformation is guided by a specification written in XML. The adaptation is executed by a generic runtime system that uses these specifications which are referred to as Guiding Specifications. This has been demonstrated by way of a motivating real world example implemented on the .Net platform. It is shown how an adapter can be specified using a simplistic Guiding Specification and related XSLT documents. This allows the implementation to work more efficiently than hand coding each adapter. It is the underlying generic runtime support that provides much of this benefit. Component based software engineering (CBSE) constructs applications by assembling components together, CBSE has been of great help to application developers due to the very fact that tailor made components can be purchased from third party vendors and can be plugged-in to a system to form a working application. But in practice 'as-is' reuse is very unlikely to occur, and most components need to be changed in some way to match the requirements of the application architecture and other components. The process of changing thecomponent for use in a particular application is often referred to as Component Adaptation.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/264806
Date January 2003
CreatorsIyer, Anand
PublisherQueensland University of Technology
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright Anand Iyer

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