METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING NETWORK SERVICES

摘要

The invention provides a method and apparatus for accessing and using services and applications from a number of sources into a customized application. The present invention accomplishes this through an entity referred to as a web service. The web services architecture maintains a directory of services (102) available to provide processing or services, along with the location of the services and the input/output schemas (401) required by the services. When a request for data or services is received (301), appropriate services are invoked by a web services engine (101) using service drivers (601) associated with each service. A web services application (605) is then generated from a runtime model (602) and is invoked to satisfy the request, by communicating as necessary with services in proper I/O formats. In one embodiment, the web services application (605) provides responses in the form of HTML that can be used to generate pages to a browser.