Toward a Reliable Service-Based Approach to Software Application Development

Abstract

The increase in Internet bandwidth, accessibility, and reliability is enabling a paradigm shift among application developers who are adopting REST (Representational State Transfer) style web services for building web applications and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud, and the difficulties of version control and discovery and management of web services have allowed for the business model of API management. This paper presents a service-based approach to software application development where an application is composed of heterogeneous distributed services. As a proof of concept, we present WSPad, a Notepad-like word processor prototype built out of distributed services. But for such applications to be reliable the services need to exist on a highly available network. To this end, service reliability issues of the proposed approach are discussed and a framework for enhancing service reliability is introduced along with prototype implementation and results.