Integrating heterogeneous Web services with WebXcript

Abstract

Despite recent uprising of the Web services technology for programmed interfaces of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce services (e-services) over the Internet, most sites (e.g., online purchases) can only support Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for human interactions through Web browsers. Automating client access to these services generally requires developing sophisticated programs to simulate human access by handling HTML pages and forms. However, these HTML interfaces vary across Web sites, and are often subjected to changes. Client maintenance is therefore tedious and expensive. This paper presents a novel approach to automate dialogs with Web-based services, using a high-level script language, called WebXcript. WebXcript provides features for HTML forms based dialogues and XML messaging. The XML syntax of WebXcript further enables convenient user authoring and easy engine development with extensively available XML tools. It supports expected responses and exception handling. We further propose a wrapper architecture to integrate heterogeneous Web services based on WebXcript. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach with examples in integrating distributed information, online ordering, and XML messaging.