Extending Java for High-Level Web Service Construction

Abstract

We incorporate innovations from the <bigwig> project into the Java language to provide high-level features for Web service programming. The resulting language, JWIG, contains an advanced session model and a flexible mechanism for dynamic construction of XML documents, in particular XHTML. To support program development we provide a suite of program analyses that at compile-time verify for a given program that no run-time errors can occur while building documents or receiving form input, and that all documents being shown are valid according to the document type definition for XHTML 1.0.

We compare JWIG with Servlets and JSP which are widely used Web service development platforms. Our implementation and evaluation of JWIG indicate that the language extensions can simplify the program structure and that the analyses are sufficiently fast and precise to be practically useful.