Dynamic invocation of Web services by using aspect-oriented programming

With the appearance and adoption of new Web services standards and technologies, developing and maintaining distributed applications is becoming a complex task. Unfortunately most of the known approaches to develop applications embrace problems about physical distribution since the early phases of design. Thus, to reduce the complexity in the development of Web-based applications, in this work we propose an approach that emphasizes locality transparency in the application design, leaving the physical distribution concerns to a later phase in the development process. In order to address this modularization concerns, we have adopted aspect-oriented programming (AOP) as a programming model that provides the means to integrate the distribution aspects in an application whenever it is needed. The AOP paradigm allows the system designer to obtain a distributed version of the application by integrating a Web services communication and coordination infrastructure. The main contribution of this work consists on simplifying the development process of Web-based applications, reducing their costs of production and maintenance, and obtaining at the same time, a considerable increase in their flexibility and dynamism.