Hyperlink Pipeline: Lightweight Service Composition for Users

This paper describes a lightweight service composition mechanism in web browsers, called hyperlink pipeline, to allow users to interactively chain distributed atomic web services into composite services similar to using Unix pipelines. This mechanism addresses the limitation in current Web, which confines users to following predefined hyperlinks and forms. We present the functional composition framework to facilitate recursive hyperlink pipeline construction and execution based on REST services and the HTML5 Micro data model to efficiently implement the framework. The proposed mechanism has been implemented and used in several web applications for real-time communication and collaboration based on WebRTC. The initial tests indicate the approach is feasible and promising.