Web Services Approach to Address the Challenges in Tribal Development

Abstract

In the world of ever-maturing distributed computing, service oriented architecture (SOA) and

representational state transfer (REST) are the popular distributed architectures whereas web

services, Windows communication foundation (WCF), .net remoting, etc., are the core

components of inter-service communications. In a multi-application environment, applications

multiply very fast and consequently inter-communication complexity grows at an alarming

rate. Simplifying the inter-application communication is a long desired goal for several

reasons. Specifically, in e-Governance type of solutions, where multiple applications are

implemented on different platforms and governed across departments, the inter-application

communication is of paramount importance for seamless service to citizens. Fail -over, load

balancing, security, etc., soon become nightmares and service management is challenged.

Distributed services and even more distributed service consumers make an inefficient

architecture – resulting in lower citizen value from systems. The objective is to develop a

prototype “Integrated Data Engine” that centralizes inter-application service calls as a proxy

which provides fault tolerance, security, load balancing capabilities, etc., with the specific

focus on tribal development sector.

Keywords: e-Governance, SOA, web services