A simplified approach to web service development

Abstract

Most languages used for developing web services and clients exhibit properties which make calling remote functions across a network a non-trivial task. The type systems used by object oriented languages have many incompatibilities with those required for service interfaces, and the complicated tasks of generating proxy objects and WSDL service definitions mean that a lot of effort is required to create a service, in comparison with defining classes and functions to be used locally. We discuss the problems with existing systems and propose a new model for web services development based on an implementation of XSLT that we are currently developing. This provides a number of features useful for distributed applications such as automatic fault tolerance and load balancing, as well as a seamless mechanism for exposing and accessing web services. © 2006, Australian Computer Society, Inc.