Web Component: A Substrate for Web Service Reuse and Composition

Web services are becoming the prominent paradigm for distributed computing and electronic business. This has raised the opportunity for service providers and application developers to develop value-added services by combining existing web services. Emerging web service standards and web service composition solutions have not addressed the issues of service re-use and extension yet. In this paper we propose the concept of web component that packages together elementary or complex services and presents their interfaces and operations in a consistent and uniform manner in the form of a class definition. Web components are internally synthesized out of reused, specialized, or extended elementary or complex web services. They are published externally as normal web services and can thus be employed by any web-based application.