Volume 6, Number 4, October-December 2009

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

“An Integrated Framework for Web Services Orchestration”

Boutrous Saab, C.; Coulibaly, D.; Haddad, S.; Melliti, T.; Moreaux, P.; Rampacek, S.

Currently, Web services give place to active research and this is due both to industrial and theoretical factors. On one hand, Web services are essential as the design model of applications dedicated to the electronic business. On the other hand, this model aims to become one of the major formalisms for the design of distributed and cooperative applications in an open environment (the Internet). In this article, the authors will focus on two features of Web services. The first one concerns the interaction problem: given the interaction protocol of a Web service described in BPEL, how to generate the appropriate client? Their approach is based on a formal semantics for BPEL via process algebra and yields an algorithm which decides whether such a client exists and synthesizes the description of this client as a (timed) automaton. The second one concerns the design process of a service. They propose a method which proceeds by two successive refinements: first the service is described via UML, then refined in a BPEL model and finally enlarged with JAVA code using JCSWL, a new language that we introduce here. Their solutions are integrated in a service development framework that will be presented in a synthetic way.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35276

PAPER TWO:

“Early Capacity Testing of an Enterprise Service Bus”

Ueno, Ken; Tatsubori, Michiaki

An enterprise service-oriented architecture is typically done with a messaging infrastructure called an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB is a bus which delivers messages from service requesters to service providers. Since it sits between the service requesters and providers, it is not appropriate to use any of the existing capacity planning methodologies for servers, such as modeling, to estimate the capacity of an ESB. There are programs that run on an ESB called mediation modules. Their functionalities vary and depend on how people use the ESB. This creates difficulties for capacity planning and performance evaluation. This article proposes a capacity planning methodology and performance evaluation techniques for ESBs, to be used in the early stages of the system development life cycle. The authors actually run the ESB on a real machine while providing a pseudo-environment around it. In order to simplify setting up the environment we provide ultra-light service requestors and service providers for the ESB under test. They show that the proposed mock environment can be set up with practical hardware resources available at the time of hardware resource assessment. Our experimental results showed that the testing results with our mock environment correspond well with the results in the real environment.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35277

PAPER THREE:

“Security for Web Services: Standards and Research Issues”

Martino, Lorenzo D.; Bertino, Elisa.

This article discusses the main security requirements for Web services and it describes how such security requirements are addressed by standards for Web services security recently developed or under development by various standardizations bodies. Standards are reviewed according to a conceptual framework that groups them by the main functionalities they provide. Covered standards include most of the standards encompassed by the original Web Service Security roadmap proposed by Microsoft and IBM in 2002 (Microsoft and IBM 2002). They range from the ones geared toward message and conversation security and reliability to those developed for providing interoperable Single Sign On and Identity Management functions in federated organizations. The latter include Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), WS-Policy, XACML, that is related to access control and has been recently extended with a profile for Web services access control; XKMS and WS-Trust; WS-Federation, Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth, that address the important problem of identity management in federated organizations. The article also discusses the issues related to the use of the standards and open research issues in the area of access control for Web services and innovative digital identity management techniques are outlined.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35278

PAPER FOUR:

“Web Service Enabled Online Laboratory”

Yan, Yuhong; Liang, Yong; Roy, Abhijeet; Du, Xinge

Online experimentation allows students from anywhere to operate remote instruments at any time. The current techniques constrain users to bind to products from one company and install client side software. We use Web services and Service Oriented Architecture to improve the interoperability and usability of the remote instruments. Under a service oriented architecture for online experiment system, a generic methodology to wrap commercial instruments using IVI and VISA standard as Web services is developed. We enhance the instrument Web services into stateful services so that they can manage user booking and persist experiment results. We also benchmark the performance of this system when SOAP is used as the wire format for communication and propose solutions to optimize performance. In order to avoid any installation at the client side, the authors develop Web 2.0 based techniques to display the virtual instrument panel and real time signals with just a standard Web browser. The technique developed in this article can be widely used for different real laboratories, such as microelectronics, chemical engineering, polymer crystallization, structural engineering, and signal processing.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35279

PAPER FIVE:

“An Efficient Service Discovery Method and its Application”

Deng, Shuiguang; Wu, Zhaohui; Wu, Jian; Li, Ying; Yin, Jianwei

To discover services efficiently has been regarded as one of important issues in the area of Service Oriented Computing (SOC). This article carries out a survey on the issue and points out the problems for the current semantic-based service discovery approaches. After that, an information model for registered services is proposed. Based on the model, it brings forward a two-phase semantic-based service discovery method which supports both the operation matchmaking and operation-composition matchmaking. The authors import the bipartite graph matching to improve the efficiency of matchmaking. An implementation of the proposed method is presented. A series of experiments show that the method gains better performance on both discovery recall rate and precision than a traditional matchmaker and it also scales well with the number of services being accessed.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35280

*****************************************************
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.
*****************************************************