Leveraging traditional distributed applications to Web services for e-learning applications

Abstract

Traditional distributed applications are relatively brittle coupling between various components in the system. These services are useful in themselves, but the Internet is still very stove-piped; connecting these services together to do more powerful things is very difficult. These difficulties can be modeled in terms of Web services, which can be accessed by any language, using any component model, running on any operating system. Web services are building blocks for creating open distributed systems and allow companies and individuals to quickly and cheaply make their digital assets available worldwide. Web services are currently concerned with five basic challenges such as service description, service implementation, service publishing, discovery and binding, and service invocation and execution. The aim is to explore what Web services are, how they are shaping, advantages and compromises for the migration from distributed application development to Web services enabling technology for e-learning process. It's high time for academia to recognize that Web services as an extremely important key to the future of campus computing on numerous fronts, with enormous implications to enhance teaching, learning and research.