Web Service Adaptation: A Unified Approach versus Multiple Methodologies for Different Scenarios

Web services provide a successful way to communicate distributed applications, in a platform- independent and loosely coupled manner. Even though there are examples of good practice for the design, development and management of Web services, there are scopes in which Web service adaptation is required, such as context, device and customer adaptation. Current proposals usually focus on client-side adaptation; however, we consider service-side adaptation more appropriate so that we can avoid larger process and memory loads for the client implementation. In this paper we propose such adaptation on the service-side, always maintaining a loosely coupled service implementation as well as keeping its main functionality structure through an aspect-oriented implementation; besides, we facilitate the work of the developer through a model-driven procedure. Therefore, a loosely coupled automatically generated code is provided to facilitate service adaptation.