Hosting Web Services on Resource Constrained Devices

Web services are getting popular in the domain of business to business electronic commerce and in automating information exchange between business processes. The use of handheld devices such as PDAs and smart phones is spreading rapidly in the business community. Accessing Web services from small devices is very common these days, but there is hardly any solution available to host Web services on such devices. There are a number of challenges to host a Web service on handheld device. These include limited resources and the lack of the execution environment to host Web services. Because of the resource constraints, it is not possible to use the existing Web service provider toolkits to host the Web service. In this paper, a light weight Web service provider toolkit is proposed that can be used for a variety of handheld devices. The insights gained into this Web service provider system are discussed in detail.