JWSR, Volume 2, Number 2, April-June 2005
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004

Editor-In-Chief: Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM, USA

EDITORIAL PREFACE:


Jia Zhang, Northern Illinois University, USA
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Simply put, a Web service refers to a programmable Web application that is universally accessible using standard Internet protocols. This paradigm of Web services has been changing the Internet from a repository of data into a repository of services along the following three dimensions: (1) by means of a business organization exposing its service on the Internet and making it accessible via standard programmatic interfaces, this model of Web services offers a promising way to facilitate business-to-business (B2B) collaboration within and across organizational boundaries; (2) the Web services technology provides a uniform framework to increase crosslanguage and cross-platform interoperability for distributed computing and resource sharing over the Internet; and (3) this paradigm of Web services opens a new cost-effective way of engineering software to quickly develop and deploy Web applications by dynamically integrating other published Web services components to conduct new business transactions.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"The Deployment of Protocol Stack Components Using Web Services"

Curran, K.
Gallagher, B.

Multimedia has varying optimal transport methods. The traditional methods employed by transport protocols are to ship all data through identical protocol stacks. An ideal method would transport each media through an optimized stack constructed solely for that medium, allowing improved multimedia QoS to be achieved even at runtime. Dynamically composable protocol stacks overcome the limitations imposed by generic protocol stacks. A dynamically composable protocol stack allows optimization for particular traffic. Here, protocol layers such as real-time G.711 or PCM conversion capabilities could be deployed to address the impedance matching across heterogeneous receivers. Protocol layers are created by the protocol stack (using a Protocol Profiler) according to a properties argument defined when creating an instance of Stack. The SOAP is a lightweight remote procedure calling protocol for the exchange of structured data in a decentralized environment. SOAP enables programs to run and interoperate with other SOAP applications (called Web services) in a distributed environment. The SOAP protocol is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Transmission Protocol (HTTP), which, it is claimed, makes it a language- and platform-neutral vehicle for RPC over the Internet and through firewalls. This paper describes a SOAP Web service deployed on an apache Tomcat server that enables clients to download protocol stack components as MIME attachments. The deployment middleware framework is named Webber. Webber provides additional flexibility that can be extremely useful for environments that have not been considered by standard generic protocols.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4863

PAPER TWO:

"Toward the Right Communication Protocol for Web Services"

Tari, Z.
Malhotra, M.
Tari, A.
McKinlay, M.

Web Services require a common understanding of messages and message content in order to interact with each other. Several protocols have been proposed, which are coded into agent interfaces or implemented using framework-specific methods such as shared repositories. However, an agent wishing to interact with a large number of other disparate agents cannot be expected to have knowledge of how to initiate or maintain a conversation with all other agents it may encounter. In this paper, we propose a dynamic communication protocol for Web services?ynWES. This involves the publication of protocol specifications representing a finite state machine (FSM). A client agent downloads this specification, validates it for correctness, and then implements the protocol dynamically as a state machine. Mechanisms for building FSMs and checking their correctness are presented. An implementation of DynWES also is described and tested (using applications in the wine selling business domain).

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4864

PAPER THREE:

"Web Services Discovery with DAML-QoS Ontology"

Zhou, C.
Chia, L.-T.
Lee, B.-S.

As more and more Web services are deployed, Web service discovery mechanisms become essential. Similar services from different sources often exhibit quite different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. For service selection and management purpose, it is necessary to explicitly, precisely, and flexibly specify various constraints and QoS metrics for Web services descriptions. This paper provides a novel ontology as a complement to DARPA Agent Markup Language Service (DAML-S) Ontology to provide a better QoS metrics model. Three layers are defined, together with clear role descriptions for development. Cardinality constraints are utilized to describe the QoS property constraints. A matchmaking algorithm with multiple matching degrees is provided accordingly. When incorporated with DAML-S, the multiple service level objectives can be described by assigning multiple QoS profiles to one service profile. A prototype system was developed, which demonstrates the feasibility for small to medium-sized service advertisement repository.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4865

PAPER FOUR:

"Model-Based Development of Web Services Descriptions Enabling a Precise Matching Concept"

Hausmann, J.H.
Heckel, R.
Lohmann, M.

Web services are software components that can be discovered and employed at runtime using the Internet. Conflicting requirements towards the nature of these services can be identified. From a business perspective, Web services promise to enable the formation of ad-hoc cooperations on a global scale. From a technical perspective, a high degree of standardization and rigorous specifications are required to enable the automated integration of Web services. A suitable technology for Web services has to mediate these needs for flexibility and stability. To be usable in practice, this technology has to be aligned to standard software engineering practice to allow for a seamless development of Web service enabled components. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to the description of Web services. It is a visual approach based on the use of software models and graph transformations and allows for the flexible description of innovative services while providing a precise matching concept. A methodology enabling the seamless development of such Web service descriptions in the context of a standard model-based development approach is presented.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4866

PAPER FIVE:

"Integrating Intelligent Mobile Agents with Web Services"

Mateos, C.
Zunino, A.
Campo, M.

Research on Web services aims at extending the Web with computer-understandable descriptions enabling programs to interact and exploit Web-accessible programs without human intervention. Advances in this line of research will strongly benefit the fields of intelligent and mobile agents due to their potentials for building Web-enabled applications. In this paper, we describe a novel programming language called MoviLog for developing intelligent mobile agents that interact with Web services. The most interesting aspect of the language is its Reactive Mobility by Failure mechanism that allows programmers to develop mobile agents without explicitly providing code for handling mobility.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4867

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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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