Blending Web services and agents for mobile users

This paper investigates web services and mobile agents as two individually powerful technologies and when combined together, provides ease of use and reliability for any user. Web services have their shortfalls but with the help of mobile agents these weaknesses can be overcome. A single Web service may not be enough to satisfy a user's requirements. It might be necessary to combine multiple Web services together (a composite service) to satisfy a requirement; that is where agents can be used to compose Web services on behalf of their users. On the other hand, when agents move around to perform a task on behalf of a user, they will need to execute a service and such a service might be a Web service itself. In this paper we discuss why agents and Web services should not be viewed as competing technologies and we present methods for integrating them together to deliver reliable services to the end user.