Web Services Adaptation at Policy Layer

Abstract

Web services technology is evolving as a base for implementing service-oriented architectures (SOA), which has become an important architectural style for Web applications development. As Web Services development has grown considerably, the need for Quality of Service (QoS) has become a substantial aspect for developing reliable service applications. In diverse business domains, Web services need to exhibit quality characteristics such as response time, availability, and reliability. However, a problem arises when a Web service is modified, updated or replaced by a new one. The new Web service may not fully match the QoS features provided from the previous one, this unavoidable problem is recognized as a mismatch. Mismatches can be found in different layers of the Web service interoperability stack and corresponding adapters are needed to deal with this issue. This paper proposes a study to investigate the feasibility of achieving interoperability in Web services by evaluating the functionality of adapters when mismatches appear at the policy layer, which includes non-functional properties like QoS.