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. Patients 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:

• an administrative office handles appointment scheduling for a large number of doctors. This office can be staffed by a single person. That person’s salary is shared among all the doctors using the 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
• RV appointments are normally scheduled by the administrative office. They may also be scheduled by the doctors themselves. This is particularly the case when, at the end of a consultation, the doctor personally schedules a new RV appointment for their patient.

The architecture of the RV assignment service is as follows:

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

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

• [1]: The layers that enable data access are implemented using a web service J2EE
• [2]: We will present various types of clients: Java, C#, Asp.Net