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Web services are Web-based enterprise applications that use open, XML-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data between calling clients and servers. In this paper, we demonstrate that Web services can be used to construct a distributed file system, called the Web-services-based network file system (WSNFS). One of the goals of the WSNFS is to provide a platform for file sharing among heterogeneous distributed file systems. Also, as the technology of Web services is widely applied to the field of grid computing, the proposed system can aid the deployment of Web services to the data grid applications. We present the architecture of the WSNFS and define the communication-protocol standard based on Web services. Our experiences in implementing the prototype as well as the experimental results demonstrate that the practicality of the WSNFS; the performance of the prototype is comparable to that of the Sun network file system.

Keywords: distributed file system, network file system, web services, XML, SOAP

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Received October 20, 2006; revised January 17 & July 18, 2007; accepted August 3, 2007.
Communicated by Tei-Wei Kuo.
^*The preliminary result of this research was presented in International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (ICIW), February 23-25, 2006, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean. This research was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C. under grants No. 94-2213-E-003-006 and 95-2221-E-003-007.