| Development and integration are the two important issues in software engineering. With the new techniques' upgrading, researchers have to face two problems in the new computing environments. In the 1990's, one of the major progresses in information technology was the emergence of the Internet. In the domain of e-business or e-commerce, the Internet is the key technology that must be applied. Therefore, many difficulties appear, such as how to rapidly develop internet based applications and how to automatically integrate heterogenous legacy systems. This thesis is focused on the issues of distributed applications development and integration based on the computing environment, the Internet or Web.; At present, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the major communication protocol and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the uniform data description format and exchanging technology for the Internet. The invention of Web services is based on the above two techniques. Software researchers anticipate that this technique supports not only legacy system reuse but also semantic system descriptions. There is no doubt that the technique of Web services provides a portable interface over the Internet for heterogeneous systems so that it is convenient to reuse them without specific implementation issues. However, it is difficult to achieve the second goal, i.e., semantic descriptions for heterogeneous applications, because the technique of Web services is only a standard interface description approach. If the goal is reached, it is possible to discover and select required services from a registry server to integrate a new business process.; My research provides a novel approach to develop and integrate Web services. First, a semantic description is proposed so that Web services based distributed applications are implemented according to the specification. Second, it is also feasible to integrate existing Web services according to the same semantic description. In my research, the description is called, Ontology and Service Oriented (OSO) code. Correspondingly, my solution is called Ontology and Service Oriented programming.; A few advantages are available when using OSO to develop and integrate distributed applications over the Internet. First, specific implementation details are handled by an interpreter and a code generator. Those techniques are transparent to developers so that the efforts to develop and integrate are minimized. Second, since distributed applications are generated according to their semantic descriptions, there is no need to append additional semantic descriptions for legacy systems when subscribing or integrating them, which also reduces the efforts of the developer. Third, OSO code is the representation of comparable business logic on the condition that an ontology standard library is available. It is convenient to integrate legacy systems based on understanding business logic in the format of OSO. |
