An Integrated Development Environment for Web Service Composition

Web services provide an instantiation of the loosely coupled service–oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software, and other resources. However, to exploit the true potential of web services, it is critical to develop technologies and tools for composing new services from existing ones. While numerous composition approaches have been developed in the past, very little has been done towards tooling. What is clearly lacking is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ease the process of composition, thereby reducing development time and integration efforts. In this paper, we build on our previous work on service composition, and present an IDE for end–to–end composition of web services. We elaborate on the design of the IDE, describe its integration with existing technologies, and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.