Service Based Product Lines

Product lines are sets of products designed to solve complex problems that a single tool is not able to approach because of the complexity. Moreover product lines are scalable: customers can buy only components that they need to work at present. Future enhancement could be done with little training effort due to the homogeneity of products inside a product line. These method of software production is convenient also for producers that design application using a big set of software components shared by all software inside a product line. In the next few years web services will became very common on the Internet although only some basic services are available at present. These simple services could be used as low level building blocks to provide more complex functionalities through their integration. Product lines are still based on traditional components, but an evolution towards a web based architecture is needed to fulfill users requirements. Technology to build web based products line comes from the XML language family that provides mechanisms to allow information exchange between automated users. This paper analyze technological aspects of web based product lines.