One aspect of modern Web technology is that it is not
only employed to connect users to sites, but to an
increasing degree to bring together applications, as e.g.
with the help of Web services. Particularly, these
applications can reside under the control of different
organizations. In this case, the Web is actually used as a
means for establishing federations between the
organizations behind their technical systems. This enables
creating integrated business processes and thus facilitates
seamless cooperation between multiple businesses.
Naturally, the construction of such solutions raises specific
concerns that go beyond traditional approaches, including
questions of access control, identity management and
evolution in the context of federation. Emerging federation
specifications like WS-Federation or Liberty Alliance are
now offering standardized protocols as solutions to some of
these problems. Along with the technological base, the
process of establishing and operating federations also
requires dedicated models to plan and describe the systems
on an architectural level. Conventional approaches to
modeling software in general and Web applications in
particular do not specifically focus on federated
architectures. For that purpose, we propose the
WebComposition Architecture Model (WAM), a modeling
formalism based on our experience on developing
federations of Web applications as well as the concepts
found in recent federation specifications.
Reference Copy
Johannes Meinecke, Martin Gaedke: Modeling Federations of Web Applications with WAM; Pages 23-31; Proceedings of the Third Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB 2005), p. 23 -31, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 31 Oct - 2 Nov, 2005