Web Components: A Comparison between Web Services and Software Components

The software engineering discipline is experiencing a quick consolidation in the applications development activities and the use of technologies and methodologies of web-based programming. In the web services arena some oriented and based practices for the construction of large scale software applications (i.e., distributed information systems) are beginning to appear. The software development practices based on web services composition (many of them elaborated by third parts) involve similar problems to those in the component-based development arena (more extended in the COTS components), like components’ compatibility or interoperability. In the present work, it is carried out a comparative study between the traditional software components description and the web services description language (WSDL). The work also shows the limitations of the current directory service specification (UDDI) to develop distributed software applications by means of the composition of web services.