Aligning with the Web: an atom-based architecture for Web services discovery

Abstract

During the past three years, the Web has undergone a radical change towards a highly user-centred cyberspace where end users can easily participate and collaborate for their own benefits and profits. The surge of Web services has created increasingly demand by end users and small-and-medium enterprises to effectively participate in service publication, discovery, and subscription over the Web. However, current public service discovery mechanism, one of the key aspects in the SOA, does not align itself with this fully user-oriented Web. The recent shutdown of public UDDI exposes issues and makes public Web services discovery missing. In this paper, we propose a novel Web service discovery architecture—AtomServ, which is built upon widely adopted Web2.0 technology (RSS/Atom) and the publish/subscribe model. It aims to provide a handy and scalable discovery facility for most Web services providers and requesters, who can easily participate in service discovery via various user-friendly application interfaces (e.g., web browsers, mobile phones). With the proliferation of RSS/Atom, AtomServ widens the adoption of service discovery by allowing simple and unified user access to frequently changing business services. This undoubtedly lowers the entry barrier for end users to play their roles in a user-centred Service-Oriented Web environment.