1 WSLS: AN AGILE SYSTEM FACILITATING THE PRODUCTION OF SERVICE-ORIENTED WEB APPLICATIONS MARTIN GAEDKE, MARTIN NUSSBAUMER, JOHANNES MEINECKE Universität Karlsruhe (TH) {gaedke, nussbaumer, meinecke}@tm.uni-karlsruhe.de The process of application evolution in the Web poses a tremendous challenge for Web Engineering. Changing requirements demand solutions providing flexibility beyond mere adaptation on the surface. The shift towards agile systems results in advantages noticeable during the whole application lifecycle. By enabling a reconfigurable composition of the overall system, a reduction of development and maintenance cost can be achieved. In this paper we introduce the WebComposition Service Linking System (WSLS) that provides an agile approach to the Web application life-cycle. WSLS is a component-based system, which applies the service-oriented paradigm. It supports issues of composing, discovering and reusing services. Services are maintainable, manageable and configurable building blocks – as such they are a unit for reuse and for composition of Web applications. Evolution of the composed services is supported and guided in a systematic way by the underlying WSLS framework. 1 Introduction Since the DotCom crisis and the consequent break-down of the stock exchange courses at the latest, the times when each new internet-based idea or technology led to “HYPE” and various expensive projects are over. More than ever, enterprises and organizations concentrate on their actual mission and emphasis the added value of their IT environments. This includes primarily optimization of associated value- added chains regarding supply and demand as well as cost-performance oriented criteria. Due to the recent focusing on value-added chains, the long-proven concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) received a significant upturn. SOA describes the collaboration of different tasks like offering a service by the service provider, finding the service by a service registry (respectively service directories or a service repository) as well as consuming the service by a consumer of the service. One reason for this boost is based on focusing the architecture and the integration of services rather than the technology used to realize a dedicated service. Although the SOA paradigm provided successfully the basic principle for different approaches like the component technologies CORBA and Microsoft’s (D)COM, the technological gap imposed by heterogeneous IT landscapes could not be bridged. Novel standards and recommendations adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) like SOAP and XML-based Web Services [12] allow the realization of business processes in a technology-spanning and platform independent manner. Engineering Advanced Web Applications, M. Matera, S. Comai (Eds.), Rinton Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Pages 26-37, ISBN 1-58949-046-0, 2004