Migrating Component-Based Web Applications to Web Services: Towards Considering a "Web Interface as a Service"

Web component-based development is a challenging development paradigm, whose attraction to practitioners is increasing more and more. One of the main advantages of this paradigm is the ability to build customizable and composable web application modules as independent units of development, and to share them with other developers by publishing them in libraries as COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) or free components. In parallel, since many years, Web services confirmed their status of one of the most pertinent solutions for a service provider, like Google or Amazon, to open its solutions for third party development. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate existing web component-based applications to a set of primitive and composite Web services and deploy them on a web service provider. This transformation helps server-side web application developers in transforming their "user interface"-based web components into a set of web services intended for remote code extensions. We implemented our solution on a collection of Java-related technologies. Java EE components are the input of the proposed implementation, and a set of Java Web services with their WSDL interfaces, choreographies and orchestrations of these services are provided at output.