JWSR, Volume 1, Number 4, October-December 2004
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"First Wave of Web Services Adoption in Research"

Kwei-Jay Lin, University of California, Irvine, USA
Janming Ho, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

The interest and the demand for the Web services technology and the serviceoriented architecture (SOA) are currently at an all-time high. By all measures, the Web services technology is marching in full force in the computer software industry. Most IT companies now have some product offerings on supporting Web services standards, including SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. Many software industry leaders (such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun Micro, etc.) are enthusiastically involved in the definition of new and advanced Web service standards, ranging from service security (WSSecurity), business process (BPEL), to inter-operability (WS-I). The market for SOA, including software, services and hardware, is expected to reach $21 billion by 2007, according to IDC. Use of Web services is also expected to increase dramatically, with 80% of businesses expected to have projects underway by 2008. In a recent industry report, most of the IT professionals working for large corporations consider the migration from legacy applications to Web services as the top priority for the next 12 to 18 months.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"Model-Driven Web Service Development"

R. Gronmo
D. Skogan
I. Solheim,
J. Oldevik

Web service technologies are becoming increasingly important for integrating systems and services. There is much activity and interest around standardization and usage of Web service technologies. Contemporary Web services are described in the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). However, WSDL documents can be difficult to understand for service developers. This article recommends a model-driven process for Web service development combining the graphical modeling language UML with WSDL. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is developed by Object Management Group. In the proposed process, Web service descriptions (in WDSL) are converted to UML; their UML models are integrated to form composite Web services; and then the new Web service descriptions are exported. The main contribution of this article is a pure UML modeling strategy supported by implementation of two-way conversion rules between the UML models and the WSDL documents.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4535

PAPER TWO:

"Matchmaking for Business Processes Based on Choreographics"

A. Wombacher
P. Fankhauser
B. Mahleko
E. Neuhold

Web services have a potential to enhance B2B e-commerce over the Internet by allowing companies and organizations to publish their business processes on service directories where potential trading partners can find them. This can give rise to new business paradigms based on ad-hoc trading relations as companies, particularly small to medium scale, can cheaply and flexibly enter into fruitful contracts, for example through subcontracting from big companies by simply publishing their business processes and the services they offer. More business process support by the Web service infrastructure is however needed before such a paradigm change can materialize. A service for searching and matchmaking of business processes does not yet exist in the current infrastructure. We believe that such a service is needed and will enable companies and organizations to be able to establish ad-hoc business relations without relying on manually negotiated interorganizational workflows. This article gives a formal semantics to business process matchmaking based on finite state automata extended by logical expressions associated to states.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4536

PAPER THREE:

"The Design of QoS Broker Algorithms for QoS-Capable Web Services"

T. Yu
K.-J. Lin

QoS (quality of service) support in Web services is an important issue since it ensures service usability and utility for each client and, in addition, improves server utilization. In this article, we present a QoS-capable Web service architecture, QCWS, by introducing a QoS broker module between service clients and providers (servers). The functions of the QoS broker module include tracking QoS information about servers, making selection decisions for clients, and negotiating with servers to get QoS agreements. We study two resource allocation algorithms (HQ and RQ) used by QoS brokers acting as the front-end of servers. The goals of the algorithms are to maximize the server resource usage while minimizing the QoS instability for each client. The first algorithm, HQ, assigns a homogeneous service level to all clients on the system and adjusts the service level according to the number of active clients. The second algorithm, RQ, assigns different service levels to clients according to their needs. Both algorithms try to minimize the resource reallocations for existing clients. The QoS performance and instability trade-offs are studied by simulation.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4537

PAPER FOUR:

"A Preliminary Study of Suppressing Redundant Nested Invocations from a Web Service with Active Replication"

C.-L. Fang
D. Liang
C. Chen
P. Lin

Zwass (1996) suggested that middleware and message service is one of the five fundamental technologies used to realize electronic commerce (EC). The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is recognized as a more promising middleware for EC applications among other leading candidates such as CORBA. We notice that the fault-tolerance issue is somewhat neglected in the current standard, that is, SOAP 1.1. We therefore proposed a fault tolerant Web service called fault-tolerant SOAP or FT-SOAP through which Web services can be built with higher resilience to failure. Active replication is a common approach to building highly available and reliable distributed software applications. The redundant nested invocation (RNI) problem arises when servers in a replicated group issue nested invocations to other server groups in response to a client invocation. In this work, we propose a mechanism to perform auto-suppression of redundant nested invocation in an active replication FT-SOAP system. Our approach ensures the portability requirement of a middleware, especially for FT-SOAP. The current design of the suppression mechanism itself does not consider the fault-tolerance issue. In other words, it suffers from the single-point of failure. Furthermore, the preliminary performance results indicates significant performance penalty due to inefficient SOAP invocations. More comprehensive experiments are needed to further investigate the feasibility of the current approach in the context of system performance.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4538

PAPER FIVE:

"A Semi-Automatic Approach to Composite Web Services Discovery, Description and Invocation"

Q. Liang
L.N. Chakarapani
S.Y.W. Su
R.N. Chikkamagalur
H. Lam

With the popularity of the Web services technology, more and more software systems?functionalities become available by being published and registered as Web services. Registered Web services need to be dynamically combined to form composite services when individual simple services fail to meet service requestors?complex service needs. In this article, we propose a semi-automatic approach to composite Web services discovery, description and invocation. We present an intelligent registry with constraint matching capabilities to support composite service discovery and description. It provides a user interface to interactively compose a service request. It then uses a semi-automatic mechanism and a search algorithm to construct a composite service template that satisfies the request. The operations of the template are bound to registered service operations by constraint matching subsequently. The resulting composite service is specified in the Web Services Flow Language. A composite service processor is designed to execute composite services by invoking the component service operations of various service providers.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4539

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR) in your Institution's library.
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