An approach to lightweight deployment of web services

Abstract

Web Services is gradually becoming the most popular distributed computing paradigm for the Internet. Although several vendor and research efforts are in progress, fully-fledged deployment of Web Services in a wide scale has not been accomplished yet. The present contribution describes a framework for lightweight deployment of Web Services. This framework can be seen as a contribution to a smooth transition step towards a complete largescale deployment. The paper starts with a description of data access techniques supporting multiple data providers, devised and used in the scope of a European research project. It is illustrated how schemes employed to provide remote transparent access to the data providers evolved to a lightweight Web Services framework.