Engineering of Web services with XML and XSL

Abstract

The important role of Web services in businesses and organizations is undisputed today. The construction and management of large Web services is still a challenge. The life cycle of a Web service includes the analysis, design, implementation and maintenance stages and Web service engineering covers all phases of Web service life cycle. The majority of Web tools developed so far only address the implementation phase and lack support for the other stages. Furthermore, emerging requirements such as the support for mobile devices have introduced new challenges and problems developers have to deal with. The World Wide Web Consortium's eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) are standards defined in the interest of multi-purpose publishing and content reuse and are increasingly being deployed in the construction of Web services. This tutotial shows how to design, implement, and manage adaptable XML/XSL-based Web services. It discusses and presents our experiences in maintaining and building the Vienna International Festival Web service. It gives a brief overview of popular Web engineering technologies and some tools we have developed. The tutorial also examines the common difficulties, non-difficulties, and solutions of Web service engineering and presents work being done in the area.