Combining WS-Policy and Aspect-Oriented Programming

Web Service technologies offer a successful way for interoperability among applications. However, although current approaches are beginning to address how to specify non-functional capabilities in Web Services at description level, they have so far failed to propose an acceptable method to decouple the named capabilities from Web Service implementations, resulting in a large amount of code scattered and tangled all over the application. Considering it is our desire to minimize middleware participation in nonfunctional properties management, it is the aim of this paper to describe how aspect-oriented techniques can be used in conjunction with WS-Policy in order to allow the mentioned properties to be completely decoupled at description and implementation level, thus improving their reusability and service maintenance and evolution.