Web Service Interface Design for e-Business Application: A Minimalistic Design Approach

Abstract

The success of projects using Web service will, to a large extent depend on effective interface design and development methodologies used in the construction of web applications. As service interface constitutes the basic building blocks of service oriented applications; decisions about what constitute a service operation and what elements are inside the schema are of vital importance. This paper proposes to use a minimalistic design approach to optimise a set of standard business documents and interfaces where multiple business events consume related business documents. The core idea of the interface design is that any events to be applied to a document are to be included in the document itself. Thus the resulting interface is able to process multiple actions corresponding to a business document. The method will not only reduce the number of interfaces in the service and the elements in the message but ultimately reduce the number of messages exchanged.