Web Services Invocation Framework: A Step towards Virtualizing Components

Initially, Web services had to do with communication between executables via ubiquitous Internet protocols and technologies. But in the meantime, Web services are used as virtualization layer for any kind of executables, both within an enterprise as well as across enterprises. As a consequence, any kind of protocol and communication technology must be supported to allow users to stay in the Web service paradigm when communicating with program functions. We introduce the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) which provides a flexible runtime environment for the invocation of Web services. With a client interface that is independent from the actual invocation protocol, it supports an extensible set of protocol bindings, and performs the Web service invocation in a fully dynamic or completely compiled style. We describe the major properties of the architecture of WSIF, explain its extensibility concepts and describe its client programming model.