Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem-solving environments: a Web services approach

摘要

This paper presents WSOWG, a Web-services-oriented wrapper generator for automatically wrapping non-networked legacy codes as Web services for reuse in distributed problem-solving environments. Using WSOWG, a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) legacy code has been wrapped as a Web service. A problem-solving environment for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows has also been implemented. A user makes use of the CFD service through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the service. In this way, a user's computing environment can be extended to a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. Performance evaluation shows that the overhead to invoke the CFD Web service generated by WSOWG using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and CORBA Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) is reasonable compared with that of invoking another CFD Web service manually wrapped from the CFD legacy code using SOAP only.