Opening Web Applications for Third Party Development: a Service-Oriented Solution

International audienceWeb applications are nowadays prevalent software systems in our every-day's life. A lot of these applications have been developed for only end-users. Thus, they are not designed by considering future extensions to these applications that would be developed by third parties. One possible and interesting solution for opening these applications for such kind of extension development is to create and deploy Web services starting from these applications. In this paper, we present a method and a tool for semi-automatically creating Web service implementations from applications having Web interfaces. The proposed method generates operations that are published in Web services for each functionality provided by a Web application. In addition, it generates new operations starting from Web interfaces. Our approach goes further in the creation of services by generating executable orchestrations, as BPEL processes, starting from navigations in the Web interfaces of these applications and by providing BPMN choreography specifications starting from the collaborations between the generated Web services. We implemented and experimented our solution on a collection of Java-related technologies