Built upon a foundation of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) technologies, Web services have become a widely accepted industry standard in the last few years [1, 2]. Because of their platform independence, universal compatibility, and network accessibility, Web services will be at the heart of the next generation of distributed systems. As more vendors offer SOAP tools and services, the advantages of using SOAP and Web services as an integration point will become even more pronounced. The Grid computing community has also recognized the importance of using Web. | 34 Storage manager and file transfer Web services1 William A. Watson III Ying Chen Jie Chen and Walt Akers Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility Newport News Virginia United States INTRODUCTION Built upon a foundation of Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP Web Services Description Language WSDL and Universal Description Discovery and Integration UDDI technologies Web services have become a widely accepted industry standard in the last few years 1 2 . Because of their platform independence universal compatibility and network accessibility Web services will be at the heart of the next generation of distributed systems. As more vendors offer SOAP tools and services the advantages of using SOAP and Web services as an integration point will become even more pronounced. The Grid computing community has also recognized the importance of using Web services. The Globus project has proposed adding a Web service layer to its existing infrastructure and has proposed an Open Grid Services Architecture OGSA 3 . The Unicore project has already developed an OGSA-compliant Web services wrapper for 1 Work supported by the Department of Energy contract DE-AC05-84ER40150. Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Edited by F. Berman A. Hey and G. Fox 2003 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBN 0-470-85319-0 790 WILLIAM A. WATSON III ETAL. their Grid Toolkit 4 . Other forums are likewise engaged in developing Web services for Grids and portals 5 . In the Fall of 2000 ahead of the major projects move to Web services Jefferson Lab started to investigate the feasibility of providing Grid capabilities using XML-based Web services. These XML services were later migrated to SOAP-based Web services. The goal of this ongoing work is to present all available resources in the Grid to the users as a single virtual system a computing metafacility. To achieve this many loosely coupled Web systems such as a distributed data Grid a distributed batch system and so on are required. In
