Creating GUIs for Web Services

Using standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP, it is now possible to discover a Web service and determine the interface and message format that it understands. However, actually calling a Web service requires carefully studying its documentation and then writing special-purpose code to handle the service. There is not enough information provided in WSDL definitions to allow the generation of a user-friendly GUI for a service. In particular, there are currently no standards for making a service accessible thorough a Web browser; doing so requires an ad-hoc implementation. To solve this problem, we have written XMLbased standards that make creating user-friendly browser-based GUIs for Web services a straightforward task. We have also created an engine that implements our standards. We explain our design in this article.