Investigating the Suitability of Wireless Web Services to Support Business Processes

Nowadays we need to access information anytime from anywhere. This greatly increases our productivity and our quality of life. Previously web services were physically tied up to servers but wireless web services have proved to be very convenient and this convenience has been the most important factor behind the adoption of wireless technology. An example to demonstrate this might be the use of a wireless web service in a supermarket to get useful information and this is achieved by using an easy, client-side wireless web service to get the core web services required. This paper contains a description of an ad-hoc wireless web service that has been developed for a supermarket and will investigate upon the suitability of web services for implementing ad-hoc mobile application integration. Basically when a customer equipped with a Wi-Fi enabled device enters a region of the supermarket within range of wireless access points, he/she will be offered a list of services that are offered by the supermarket. Some of these services might include information about products at a discounted price, queries about particular products, marketing of new products being offered, location of particular items on shelves, identification of new point of sales just opened, just to name a few. This can be potentially beneficial especially considering the number of persons now having smart phones and mobile devices.