Web Services Software Architecture

Web services have received widespread attention and acceptance in the software engineering community. Automatic composition of services, to meet user’s requirements, is a powerful mechanism to ensure satisfaction of varied needs and thus enable the vision of Web services. Although Web services are equipped with the fundamental concepts and supporting technologies, the architectural style of the composite service composed from Web services is fixed by the prescriptions of the Service Oriented Architecture, and does not provide the level of flexibility stipulated by alternative service-based approaches such as the Service-Based Software vision. To enable the composition of Web services using alternative architectural styles, the author proposes that software architecture be included as a parameter in the composition process. This is enabled by the use of the Alfa framework to model the desired architectural style, and the use of this information to support service discovery.