Towards automatic creation of web services for grid component composition

Abstract

While high-level software components simplify the programming of grid applications and Web services increase their interoperability, developing such components and configuring the interconnecting services is a demanding task. In this paper, we consider the combination of Higher-Order Components (HOCs) with the Fractal component model and the ProActive library. HOCs are parallel programming components, made accessible on the grid via Web services that use a special class loader enabling code mobility: executable code can be uploaded to a HOC, allowing one to customize the HOC. Fractal simplifies the composition of components and the ProActive library offers a generator for automatically creating Web services from components composed with Fractal, as long as all the parameters of these services have primitive types. Taking all the advantages of HOCs, ProActive and Fractal together, the obvious conclusion is that composing HOCs using Fractal and automatically exposing them as Web services on the grid via ProActive minimizes the required efforts for building complex grid systems. In this context, we solved the problem of exchanging code-carrying parameters in automatically generated Web services by integrating the HOC class loading mechanism into the ProActive library. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.