Testing the Effectiveness of Dynamic Binding in Web Services

In recent years, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have risen in use as an architectural style for distributed systems. They have many desirable features such as flexibility, software reuse and cost benefits. In addition to this, SOA enables and indeed encourages the binding of services at runtime in the form of dynamic binding. Here, services are bound to service requests at runtime and the choice of service is determined with minimal user intervention. Presently, Web Services have risen as the de facto implementation of SOA and existing research for the testing of Web Services have assumed the choice of service at design-time. However, dynamic binding of services raises several additional challenges, such as managing complexity in service compositions using dynamic binding and non-deterministic behaviour in service selection. Few research exists that involve dynamic binding but with limitations as they do not consider the dynamic binding system itself. This paper focuses on the importance of the dynamic binding system and proposes a technique that can be used to test dynamic binding systems such that the behaviour of the algorithm can be determined.