JWS: a flexible web service

Abstract

Web services have been proposed as means to provide more convenient access to computation services. An issue that still must be dealt with is what to do if there is no web service with the desired functionality. Deploying a new web service requires expertise in the relevant technologies as well as access to a web services server. In this paper we present the Java Web Service, a web service that allows the provision of almost arbitrary functionality by means of uploading the functionality as a plug-in at run-time. Plug-ins can also be combined through a simple scripting mechanism.