Mobile web service provisioning in cellular enterprise

Abstract

It is well accepted by now that the Internet can be seen as a large-scale distributed information system with numerous information providers and users. We are also entering a new generation of an open and dynamic Web, with peer production, sharing, collaboration, distributed content, and decentralized authority in the foreground. This new Web generation is often termed “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly, 2005). From the information systems engineering viewpoint, the Internet and Web 2.0 have led the evolution from static content to Web services. Web services are distributed software components that can be accessed over the Internet, using well-established Web mechanisms and XML-based open standards and transport protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) (Box et al., 2000) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (IETF, 1999). Public interfaces of Web services are defined and described using W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)-based standard and Web Service Description Language (WSDL) (Christensen et al., 2001). Web services have a wide range of applications, and are primarily used for enterprise integration. The biggest advantage of Web services lies in their simplicity in expression, communication, and servicing. The componentized architecture of Web services also makes them reusable, thus reducing development time and costs (Gottschalk et al., 2002).