A developer's view of application servers interoperability

Abstract

The paper describes analysis of application servers interoperability that considers both the available level of integration and the required level of development complexity. Development complexity ranges from simple GUI operations to changes of undocumented features in configuration files. We verify if an integration can be established on a given level of development complexity, rather than verify if it is objectively feasible. The information indicates whether an integration task can be performed by a non-expert developer, which influences development cost and effort. We focus our work on the Web services standards as leading solutions in service integration. We designed a dedicated test environment that covered Web services based application servers, and helper tools for communication monitoring. We present results and conclusions from performed experimental studies. Detailed results were registered in a web system that supplies descriptions covering specification of application servers, used standards, and configuration options. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.