On the Development of Internationalized Web Service Applications in Distributed Heterogeneous Client-Server Environments

Web Services are rapidly emerging as the basis for the next generation of the eCommerce infrastructure, and SOAP is considered the de facto protocol for the invocation of Web Services. Unfortunately, none of the Internet internationalization forums dealing with the topic of internationalization in XML and Internet, has addressed the issue of localization in distributed Internet environments. In all the existing Web Services implementations, a Web Service provider may freely impose its own locale and time zone on all the locale- and time zone- sensitive computation requests from Web Service requestors.

The internationalization service in IBM WebSphere transparently propagates the 'internationalization context' consisting of the locale and time zone information using IIOP, thereby providing a unique infrastructure for distributed internationalization in Java(tm) 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environments, and potentially also in CORBA environments.

Typically, Web Services components are implemented as wrappers over existing server-side business components. The present paper proposes an architectural extension to Web Services for distributed internationalization, where the wrapped business components use internationalization service for localization. The implementation is built on the top of the existing internationalization service, and uses Axis, the Apache open group's emerging implementation of Web Services, for transparently injecting internationalization contexts to and extracting the same from SOAP messages. The interaction with the backbone internationalization service is discussed in detail.

The use of the proposed Web Service infrastructure is illustrated with appropriate examples. The ongoing and future internationalization work in the domain of Web Services is also highlighted.

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