AOP for Dynamic Configuration and Management of Web Services

Web service technologies accelerate application development by allowing the selection and integration of third-party web services, achieving high modularity, flexibility and configurability. However, current approaches only allow this integration by hard wiring the references to concrete web services into the client applications. Moreover they do not provide any management support, which is fundamental for achieving robustness. We observe the need for the application to be independent of specific services and present the WSML, a management layer placed in between the application and the world of web services. In this paper we identify the requirements for this layer to realise the dynamic selection and integration of services, client-side management of services, and support for rules that govern the selection, integration and composition. We show how dynamic AOP is ideally suited to implement the core functionality of the WSML using the JAsCo dynamic aspect-oriented language to conduct the experiments.