Adapt: Towards Autonomic Web Services

Organizations are increasingly using the Web not only to sell products and deliver information, but also for providing their services to businesses and individual customers. Typically, the provision of such services by organizations requires the construction of applications that integrate existing enterprise information systems to offer new business functions. Organizations need to ensure that these services are available, scalable and also autonomic to guarantee that user interactions are promptly processed even under highly volatile conditions. In most cases, organizations use application servers with a multi-tier architecture for the delivery of their services. In the following, we will refer to services not relying on other web services as Basic Services (BSs). The presence of a wide variety of BSs over the Internet has created an exciting new business opportunity of providing value added, inter-organizational services by composing multiple BSs into new Composite Services (CSs). The Adapt project aims to provide autonomic support for both basic and composite web services. In the following sections we describe autonomic support for both kinds of web services.