Development and Composition of E-Learning Web Services Using Service Oriented Architecture

In recent era of cloud computing, web service technology has become the most important and popular technology to generate and provide dynamic web services. The utility computing and on-demand services are the basic characteristics of cloud computing, where any legacy web application can be converted into dynamic web services as per the requirements. Some web services need to be combined with defined business logic or rules to satisfy the customer. Web service composition is the cost-effective way of developing combined services for any web application. Web services are services with standard interfaces that provide specific functionality of application. Web services are usually implemented using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Web services are combined to make two or more web services communicate with each other to provide combined functionality. To make service oriented architecture effective, services needs to be identified and defined correctly. In this paper, a methodology is defined to identify, implement and combine the web services for an e-learning application. An E-learning application is created by using various web services and combined by specifying certain rules. E-learning is an electronic educational technology where the e-learning portal is implemented using SOA approach. The paper aims at three main objectives: web services creation, composition of web services and handling the exceptions for composition. The four main web services considered for e-learning application are contents, quiz, assignment and forum. Web services are combined using Orchestration and Choreography techniques and compared with the response time of the services execution.