Web browsers as service-oriented clients integrated with Web services

Abstract

Web browsers are becoming important application clients in SOAs (Service-Oriented Architectures) because more and more Web applications are built from multiple Web Services. Therefore incorporating Web Services into Web browsers is of great interest. However, the existing Web Service frameworks bring significant complexities to traditional Web applications based on DHTML since such Web Service frameworks use RPC (Remote Procedure Call) or a message-passing model while DHTML is based on a document-centric model. Therefore Web application developers have to bridge the gaps between these two models such as an Object/XML impedance mismatch. In our novel approach, in order to request Web Services, the application programs manipulate documents with uniform document APIs without invoking service-specific APIs and without mapping between objects and XML documents. The Web Service framework automatically updates the document by exchanging SOAP messages with the servers. We show that in our new framework, WebDrasil, we can request a service with only one XPath expression, and then get the response using DOM (Document Object Model) APIs, an approach which is efficient and easily understood by typical Web developers. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.