Interoperability among independently evolving web services
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IFIP/USENIX international conference on Middleware, page 331--351. Toronto, Canada, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., (2004)Abstract
The increasing popularity of XML Web services motivates us to examine if it is feasible to substitute one vendor service for another when using a Web-based application, assuming that these services are "derived from" a common base. If such substitution were possible, end users could use the same application with a variety of back-end vendor services, and the vendors themselves could compete on price, quality, availability, etc. Interoperability with substituted services is non-trivial, however, and four types of incompatibilities may arise during such interoperation -- \textlessI\textgreaterstructural\textless/I\textgreater, \textlessI\textgreatervalue\textless/I\textgreater, \textlessI\textgreaterencoding\textless/I\textgreater and \textlessI\textgreatersemantic\textless/I\textgreater. We address these incompatibilities three-fold: (1) static and dynamic analysis tools to infer whether an application is compatible with a substituted service, (2) semi-automatically generated middleware components called \textlessI\textgreatercross-stubs\textless/I\textgreater that actually resolve incompatibilities and enable interoperation with substituted services, and (3) a lightweight mechanism called \textlessI\textgreatermulti-option types\textless/I\textgreater to enable applications to be written from the ground up in an interoperation-friendly manner. Using real applications and services as examples, we both demonstrate and evaluate our tools and techniques for enabling interoperation with substituted services.
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