As application developers move toward building component-based web service applications, the traditional tools and development models turn out insufficient to meet the new requirements from rapid evolution due to the speed of the Internet. This paper presents an XML-powered framework designed to build adaptive software components, in order to relieve developers from low-level implementation tasks and concentrate on the processing logic of the applications. We focus the analysis on the uses of XML to power the framework through an extensible processing control description, while demonstrating how this framework brings the needed evolutionary adaptability and manageability to web service applications.