Schema-driven Customization of Web Services

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses schema-driven customization of Web services. Web services are emerging as a standard mean of publishing and accessing data on the Web, by providing a standard XML-based protocol to invoke remote programs over the Web (simple object access protocol (SOAP)), along with a standard language to describe them (web service description language (WSDL)). XML is becoming the universal format for data exchange between applications. Recently, the use of XML documents, where some of the data is given explicitly, while other parts are defined by programs that generate the relevant data, started gaining popularity. This chapter refers to such documents as intensional documents. Materialization is the process of invoking some of the programs included in an XML document and replacing them by their results. The goal of this demonstration is to advocate for the exchange of such intensional XML documents between applications, and to illustrate the new possibilities and the great flexibility they bring to application design.