Tutorial/CPD on WebServices

 

Dr Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

University of Leicester

srm13@le.ac.uk

 

 

Proposed Outline of Tutorial

 

The tutorial will be an introduction to the concepts and technologies behind web services. The tutorial will be delivered as a number of lectures. All lectures will be delivered at a more abstract level, so prior knowledge of web service is not required.

 

Topics:

 

1. Introduction to Service Oriented Architectures and Webservices

We introduce the general concepts of Service oriented Architecture (SoA) and Web Services (WS) – a specific implementation of SoA.  Key components of WS are the underlying XML protocols and service discovery. We will explore these to some extent. We conclude the introduction with a discussion of the two major contenders for WS architecture: Java WS and .net.                                   

 

2. Ind Case studies

Web Services are not just academic, in fact most of the underlying technologies stem from industrial consortia. However, it is interesting to see whether WS are just a hype created by IBM, Sun and MS to improve sales. In this hour we will look at some documented case studies where WS have been used in an industrial context and

explore the lessons learned.

 

3. Demo

As the course does not offer hands on experience, we will look at an example web service implementation in this demo.

 

4. WS Challenges

Despite having been supported for some years now, web services are still an emerging paradigm and under continuous improvement. We will look at some of the issues that are of relevance for the wide spread adoption of web services and the ongoing research. Of particular interest are the semantic web, coordination and composition, and the business process execution language (BPEL). WS Security is another area of interest. Also, my own work on policy controlled service composition falls within this area and will be presented briefly.

 

5. WS and Re-Engineering

I will briefly look at some tools and approaches to re-engineering towards WS, this is brief because re-engineering is not my specialist area and also because there does (surprisingly?) not seem to be much out there. Nevertheless, this part will give an indication of what is possible.

 

6. Market Offerings for WS

This part will look at the players in the web services field, attempting to provide an overview of the available offerings of the major players as well as interesting/ promising offerings of smaller players.