Abstract
“Web Services” technologies are shining like a beacon of hope on information system integration. Generally speaking, Web Services technologies are XML-based open standards under internet-based platforms. They intend to implement the structure of Service-Oriented Architecture and to develop a new distributed computing environment (DCE) framework. From this intention, Web Services technologies are expected to have tremendous influences on current and future E-Business development. From the point of view of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) or B2Bi (Business-to-Business Integration), Web Services technologies could be treated as a middleware standard like CORBA, DCOM and RMI. In order to make these technologies more mature, software industries have invested a lot of manpower and money to solve some potential problems like security, transaction and contract issues. Since these investments have received significant progress, it is important for enterprises to be familiar with these emerging information technologies before they become completely mature. Enterprises should also learn about the related technologies by practicing information system development under Web Services Architecture. This research intends to develop an E-Business system development procedure under Web Services architecture. The development methodology is based on the concept of Rational Unified Process (RUP) to rebuild the integrated development procedure for a web-based software system using Unified Modeling Language (UML) notations. RUP is an iterative and incremental development procedure based on the viewpoint of software-intensive concepts. UML is an object-oriented modeling language proposed by Object Management Group (OMG). Both of them have much influence on the software system development domain. This research will define Web Services stereotypes according to the extension of UML to interpret the technology information of Web Services. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed methodology, this research intends to develop a Web Services Portal to illustrate the information integration involving in the system development procedure. It is believed that this approach can provide a helpful development procedure for E-Business applications under Web Services architectures.