Towards reengineering Web sites to Web-services providers

The Web-services stack of standards is aimed at facilitating the development of Web applications by integrating software components, developed across organizational boundaries. This flexible integration relies on the specification of the components services in terms of an open, XML-based standard, WSDL. A critical step in the process of reusing existing, WSDL-specified components is the availability of a multitude of such components. Automated re-engineering methods for constructing Web services out of functionalities already offered by existing Web sites can therefore play an important role in facilitating the adoption of these standards. In this paper, we describe our work on reverse-engineering the interaction between Web-site servers and client browsers into XML specifications, syntactically and semantically close to WSDL.