2. The nature of the web service developed

An IT services company [ISTIA-IAIE] wishes to offer an appointment scheduling service. The primary target market is solo practitioners. These doctors generally do not have administrative staff. Clients wishing to make an appointment therefore call the doctor directly. This frequently disrupts the doctor’s work throughout the day, reducing their availability to patients. The company [ISTIA-IAIE] wishes to offer them an appointment scheduling service operating on the following principle:

• a receptionist handles appointment scheduling for a large number of doctors. This receptionist can be just one person. Their salary is shared among all the doctors using the appointment service.
• The administrative office and all doctors are connected to the Internet
• Appointments are recorded in a centralized database, accessible via the Internet by the administrative office and the doctors
• Appointments are normally scheduled by the administrative office. They can also be scheduled by the doctors themselves. This is particularly the case when, at the end of a consultation, the doctor schedules a new appointment for the patient.

The architecture of the appointment scheduling service is as follows:

Doctors become more efficient if they no longer have to manage appointments. If there are enough of them, their contribution to the administrative office’s operating costs will be minimal.

The company [ISTIA-IAIE] has decided to implement the server-side component as a web service. The application will have the following architecture:

• [1]: The [DAO, JPA] layers enabling data access are implemented using a J2EE web service
• [2]: We will present various client types: Java, C#, Asp.Net