Infoset for Service Abstraction and Lightweight Message Processing

Web services technologies are undergoing some significant changes at several levels, ranging from architectural styles (REST vs.. SOAP) to message formats.To cope with these changes, there is a need to design services in an abstract fashion that is less sensitive to these changes so that our technological and economic investments are protected. To address this issue, this paper proposes an abstract modeling framework, called Infoset, both as a design and analysis tool and a message processing architecture. The benefit of Infoset is demonstrated first on some dual Web services that provide both REST and SOAP access. The Infoset analysis modeling reveals the commonality and differences between dual Web services, making it feasible to design abstract web services. Infoset also leads to a rule based message processing architecture that avoids the problems in current static Object/XML SOAP engines. By dynamically computing the context of Infoset rules in message workflows, dependences between integrated Web services are reduced and the reusability of services logic is increased. A prototype of this architecture is implemented and the preliminary experimental results indicate that the performance is satisfactory.