Working session: program comprehension strategies for Web service and service-oriented architectures

The availability of the Web has made it possible to provide new life to legacy systems as Web services components within a service-oriented architecture. Web services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located, and invoked over a network, generally, the World Wide Web. The service-oriented architecture describes three roles: service provider, service requester and service broker; and three basic operations: publish, find and bind. A network component can play any or all of these roles. Web services focus on the integration and infrastructure complexities of B2B by leveraging the benefits of Web service technologies, Internet standards and common infrastructures. While the migration to Web services has the potential of providing significant value to legacy systems and components, a number of critical program comprehension issues need to be addressed. These include understanding the legacy systems and components in enough detail to make decisions on the types of changes that need to be made for using them within the new service-oriented architecture, understanding the legacy and target architectures, and analyzing the specific Web service technologies that will be required and how to incorporate the legacy components as services. This working session will discuss approaches for addressing these issues. Based on the results of the session, a working model will be developed that lists current approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as current open issues.