RAWS: reflective engineering for Web services

Reflection is a powerful tool for the adaptation of applications at runtime. The modification of Web services is a task that entails the modification and compilation of the source code, as well as the deployment of the new version of the Web service in the application server. In this paper, we introduce RAWS (Reflective and Adaptable Web Service), a Web service design model based on a reflective architecture of two levels. RAWS allows both the dynamic modification of the definition and implementation structure of the Web service, and the dynamic modification of the Web service behavior in order to change the existing code or to add new functionalities. All these dynamic modifications are performed directly on the code during execution, with no need to have the Web service source code. RAWS improves Web services adaptability and maintainability, as well as the ability for authorized clients to remotely modify them.