An Aspect Oriented Approach for Applying Features to Web Services

Web services are required to handle non-functional concerns. Such concerns can be divided to common features (security, reliability, manageability, etc.) and business specific requirements. Many of the common features are handled by toolkits such as Microsoft Web services enhancements, IBM emerging technologies toolkit and apache axis. The two main problems this paper aims to solve is the inability of current toolkits to apply a feature to multiple Web services in a single process and the fact that current toolkits require developer´s knowledge to apply features to Web services. As a solution, this paper proposes an aspect oriented approach for applying features to Web services. The aspect oriented approach presented by this paper should make the process of applying features to Web services less resource consuming and more flexible than the approach taken by current toolkits.