An Adaptive Transport Framework for Web Services

In this paper, we present an adaptive transport framework which addresses multiple message exchange patterns (MEPs) and transparent switching between multiple transports for Web services. In the framework, we separate the transportation process into transport input stage and transport output stage by using pipelined pattern. Moreover, we introduce a set of abstractions, such as transport protocol, transport session, transport handler and transport object, to provide a uniform programming model for both Web services components and the transport framework. In addition, we introduce an algorithm in transport output stage in order to handle messages of out-* MEPs and switching between multiple transports. Besides, we implement HTTP and JMS protocols based on this framework for demonstrations and evaluate its performance by comparing it with Tomcat 6.0. The results show that our framework supports multiple MEPs and transparent switching between multiple transports, as well as guarantees the performance of the transport implementation, so the framework can serve as a fundamental transport layer for Web services.