Ad-Hoc Usage of Web Services with Dynvoker

While web services are often targeted at machine-to-machine communication, they are also increasingly used directly in the interactions between humans and machines. Instead of developing specialised client applications for the invocation of these services, a generic human-driven ad-hoc usage is beneficial in many scenarios, including rapid service testing and dynamic inclusion of services as plugins into applications. We argue for the need for such a usage and extract requirements for generic web service clients. We then present a few selected use cases and introduce the Dynvoker client which already passes the majority of evaluation criteria. With its technical capabilities and open and vivid development, we consider it the most suitable and flexible generic client available and therefore highlight its role as a central component in a user-centric web service research project.