SOA Integration Technology
We have initiated work on a support tool for integrating existing Web applications designed for humans into fully-fledged web services that can be used within standard service oriented architectures (SOA).
Background & Objective: SOA applications are a new style of applications that extend the client-server model to a massively distributed collection of loosely coupled web services that can also be re-used for many other applications. Although there is a huge number of existing Web applications that serve all kinds of useful purposes, these applications are meant to be used by humans, and are not standards-based web services designed to be used by other computers. It is highly desirable to be able to convert such Web applications into web services by creating a standard wrapper, ideally with none or minimal human intervention.
Technical Discussion: The technical challenge is to wrap an existing Web application into a web service, without actually understanding the semantics of the operation of this Web application, or having access to its code. While performing this task in a completely automated manner might not be possible, our goal is to create a semi-automated wrapping tool. Our approach is to analyze the web server (e.g. Apache) log files that document the interaction of humans with a Web application, and extract the protocols and interaction sequences from these logs, so that they can be documented in standard WSDL and UDDI specifications for a web service.
Future Direction: Technically, we are addressing the fundamental problem of state-less vs. state-preserving services and applications. We are also working on mashup demos involving a mixture of original web services and converted Web applications.
Contacts:
Daniel Nikovski
Alan Esenther
Technology Area: Sensor and Data Systems
Modification Date: August 2, 2007
