Engineering Foundations of Web Services: Theories and Tool Support

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new style of development of distributed software applications, such as e-commerce web sites. This style is known as web services , and is characterised by the notion that a machine-readable web site , or web service, provides information to a software application in the same way that a conventional web site provides information to a human user. Web services thus provides an infrastructure for the development of distributed applications which are able to integrate information and computational resources from diverse locations into a single service provided to the end-user. At the infrastructural level, web services offer powerful and general universal infrastructure for naming, communication and data representation to diverse kinds of applications. For software development, web services represent a fundamental transformation of software development style in the main stream of application development, and this leads to a number of engineering challenges which must be addressed in order to establish sound programming methodologies for the delivery of safe, secure and robust systems. This project will build on established theories of communication-based systems and transfer them to the arena of web services, in order to provide a foundation for software development techniques and tools to support successful programming in this new style.