Enhancing distributed systems through web services

Abstract

The concept of Web Services has, throughout the last few years, become one of the most discussed in the academic, as well as the business world. Many hail it as a revolutionary concept, while others look at it in a sceptic manner. The fact remains that the developers of the most diffused programming languages are giving great importance to integrating and supporting the creation and utilisation of Web Services. The main advantage of Web Services is that they are based completely on XML, which gives them a very high degree of flexibility and, above all, platform independence. Systems written using one particular language, can transparently access exposed services on other systems written using different languages. This particular feature of Web Services puts them in an ideal position to be utilised as the driving force behind distributed systems. The Internet is a jungle of computers, each with their particular features, operating system and hardware platform. Such a scenario makes it very difficult to create a system, distributed over various machines, which easily adapts to such an environment and communicates with other machines in this environment. Using Web Services, this problem is naturally solved. This project aims at analysing the ways in which Web Services may be used to enhance distributed systems over the Internet framework. There are various issues which should be considered, including the software required and the security of data being transmitted.