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Professor Tharam S. Dillon |
Topic : Web services
Abstract : Evolving from traditional software components, Web services have received extensive studies within the software engineering community. Web services transcend traditional distributed object technologies (e.g. RPC, CORBA, DCOM, etc.) in that programming interfaces are described, published, discovered, executed, and composed using open standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, BPEL, etc. Standardisation represents ‘a shared understanding towards implementation independence’, a key element for building loosely-coupled distributed applications through interoperability. However, with the recent development of Web services specifications, some scholars argue that “Web services do not have much in common with the Web”. It appears that Web services technology offers far more advantages in a non-Web environment. Moreover, the current Web has undergone a radical change towards a highly user-centred platform where end users can easily participate and collaborate for their own benefits and profits. The great success of Web2.0 applications (e.g. Flickr, Youtube, Del.icio.us, etc.) indicates that the Web community has already adapted itself to accommodate massive user participation, which in turn provides astonishing reward. Nevertheless, Web services communities that enable services “on the Web”, appear reluctant (if not unaware) of these radical changes. Industry vendors and standards organisations continue pushing complex WS-* specifications. Researchers have applied much existing
work – ontology engineering, artificial intelligence, workflow theory, agent technology,
peer-to-peer infrastructure, etc., – to facilitate dynamic service discovery, execution, orchestration and coordination. However, to our best knowledge, little research has been formally carried out to justify or utilise the ‘Web’ part of ‘Web services’. In this tutorial, we will review contemporary research that aims to ‘align’ the Web services with the modern Web in two significant aspects – Web services architectural styles and Web services discovery mechanism. Based on a comprehensive survey, we will identify several critical open issues that need to be addressed when incorporating Web (2.0) techniques and philosophies into the Web services practice. These key issues and their associated solutions give rise to our proposed research framework – An Alternative Web Services Paradigms. This tutorial will also introduce our recent work in this direction: (1) An evolution trend driven by engineering principles for Internet-scaled Web services architectural design. (2) A Web services discovery platform built on top of Web 2.0 techniques and attitude. In summary, this tutorial demonstrates how to move towards creating an alternative Web services paradigm that aligns itself with the modern Web.
Audience : Researchers, executives, and software engineers, who are planning to leverage emerging Web technologies into Web services projects in order to create scalable and user-centred Web services applications.
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