WSDL-TC: Collaborative customization of web services

Abstract

Nowadays, companies recognize the need to be customer driven by providing superior service to satisfy customers' needs. But as customers and their needs grow increasing diverse, unnecessary cost and complexity are inevitably added to operations. Service providers discovered the new frontier in business competition: “Collaborative Customization.” This approach follows three steps: first to conduct a dialogue with individual customers to help them articulate their needs; second, to identify the precise offering that fulfills those needs; and third, to make customized products for them. Web services deployed over the Web are accessible to a wider user base. Web services are designed and contracted to meet the need of large number of users. Many a times, multiple customizations of the base functionality is required to cater the need of multiple set of users. This forces service provider to deploy multiple Web services customized for each set of users, which results in increasing cost of infrastructure and maintenance. Since, multiple versions of customized Web services are deployed multiple times at different URLs, it is difficult and costlier to maintain, update and backup these services and their data. The objective of this work is to reduce the efforts and cost that resulted due to these multiple versions of the Web Services. We have extended WSDL and WSDL-T to WSDL-TC that aims at reducing the cost by maintaining the different collaborative customized versions of operations of the Web service in a single deployment. The approach also manages access control of these operations to their respective groups. WSDL-TC being an extension of WSDL-T is capable of managing versions of each customized operation that resulted due to the changes in their business requirements over a period of time. The paper presents an example of hotel reservation web service to present WSDL-TC approach. WSDL-TC also eases the task of web service administrators as they have to manage the single instance instead of multiple instances of a Web service. Moreover, WSDL-TC based services when deployed in the cloud environment may help in achieving greater degree of multi-tenancy further reducing the cost for service producers.