Web Service Composition and Legacy Systems: A Survey

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained considerable interest in recent years, mostly due to the advent of standards based Web services that simplify interoperability, loose coupling and reuse. One of the basic business motivations for implementing SOA today is achieving business agility, as SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost effectively to the dynamic and continues changes in market conditions. It can also simplify interconnection to the existing legacy systems as well as reconfiguring loosely coupled business services in a simple, fast and low cost manner. For SOA to succeed in that, it is a key issue to provide a Web service composition approach to facilitate business innovation and adapt IT to today's fast changing markets. In this paper, we present a survey of some existing proposals about service composition approaches and provide an overview of the strategies for the modernization of the legacy system using SOA.