Preparing for Service-Oriented Computing: an abstract design 
for truly stubless Web service invocation



The ability to dynamically bind to Web services at runtime is becoming 
increasingly important as the era of Service-Oriented Computing 
(SOC) emerges. With SOC selection and invocation of Web service 
partners will occur in software at run-time, as opposed to by 
software developers at design and compile time. Unfortunately, 
the marketplace has yet to yield a predominate applications 
programming interface for the invocation of Web services. This 
results in software that is deeply ingrained with vendor-specific 
calls. This is problematic because Web service technology is 
changing at a rapid pace. In order to leverage the latest 
developments, code often needs to be heavily refactored to 
account for changing invocation interfaces. This paper explores 
the mitigation of this problem through the application of 
software design patterns. Specifically, it details how our 
design approach, based upon the composition of software design 
patterns, provides for implementations that insulate the 
application code from the peculiarities of any specific vendor's 
interface.