Plug-and-Play Web Services

The goal of this research is to make it easier to design and create web services for relational databases. A web service is a software service for providing data over computer networks. Web services provide data endpoints for many web applications. We adopt a plug-and-play approach for web service creation whereby a designer constructs a “plug,” which is a simple specification of the output produced by the service. If the plug can be “played” on the database then the web service is generated. Our plug-and-play approach has three advantages. First, a plug is portable. You can take the plug to any data source and generate a web service. Second, a plug-and-play service is more reliable. The web service generation checks the database to determine if the service can be safely and correctly generated. Third, plug-and-play web services are easier to code for complex data since a service designer can write a simple plug, abstracting away the data’s real complexity. We describe how to build a system for plug-and-play web services, and experimentally evaluate the system. The software produced by this research will make life easier for web service designers