Web services manager for local applications

Abstract

Web Services are the new software development evolution that has dominated the Web. Due to their flexibility and responsiveness, they can easily be incorporated to new software projects developed by software developers. Conversely they are not easily integrated to existing applications not supporting Web Services. This normally requires modification of their existing code. The aims of this dissertation are to manage and virtually integrate Web Services components to their associated local applications without the need to apply modifications to their existing code. Therefore, this thesis presents a system developed to solve the problem for these applications. A web-site for deploying Web Services components for particular applications was developed with the ability to store all the information supplied in a database and an XML file. An application for the client side was also produced. This communicates to different descriptive XML files to retrieve information for all the deployed components and all the details concerning them. From the information obtained, this application downloads the relevant components on the local machine and executes them automatically. This process is performed in the background through a separate timer thread, to remain as transparent to the user as possible and to practically integrate the local applications to their related Web Services.