Improving the predictable assembly of service-oriented architectures

Object technology's development and wide adoption has improved software applications' modularity, extensibility, and reusability. An approach that's complementary to OO software reuse entails using "Web services and service-oriented architectures". We propose an intermediate approach to Web service specification. Our technique integrates the use of regular expressions in WSDL specifications to constrain the format of argument and return values to and from Web services. This approach provides the basis for automating the generation of both client- and server-side checking wrappers. The service-oriented paradigm is founded on an assumption of well-specified and well-understood contracts that isn't realized in practice. Our approach extends the WSDL specification language with support for argument- and return-format specification brings us one step closer to realizing the assumptions on which the paradigm is based. This work is important in reducing the adoption barriers that have slowed the acceptance of Web services and SOAs. This is especially important as we closer to realizing the vision of ubiquitous computing that promises transparent integration of widely distributed services.