A Preliminary Study on Portable Interceptor Mechanism to SOAP

Web Services have become increasingly popular in distributed applications, and the SOAP technology is currently the most widely used Web Service. Recently, middleware researchers have applied the interception approach to problems in various domains. Instead of providing a portable interceptor like that used in the CORBA protocol, SOAP 1.2 provides an intermediary mechanism, which has to solve the backward compatible issue to be used as an interceptor. In this paper, we evaluate the interception requirements for CA, CF, FT, and LB. Our findings suggest that the run-time administration features of the current CORBA Portable Interceptor are not appropriate for some application domains. This motivates us to develop a new Portable Interceptor Mechanism (PIM) for SOAP so that the protocol meets the interception requirements of all Web Services. The proposed PIM includes portable interceptor management in the SOAP engine and portable interceptor interface definitions.