WeSCoS : A First Step Towards Web Programming

The characteristics of the Web and its services, such as typeless data, service accessibility, and service autonomy, provide an appealing environment for composing services, although these same properties raise new challenges. We have prototyped WeSCoS, a Web Service Composition System, that is itself accessed as a Web service and provides a framework for composition. It is an early testbed to experiment with Web composition and identify distributed system issues that will need to be addressed in order to enable a style of large-scale Web programming, in which developers will use Web services as simple components to be loosely integrated into robust, large-scale applications. The main design component of WeSCoS is a per-service specification document, which encapsulates all necessary information for the WeSCoS system to automatically execute service requests, both atomic and composite.