Nomadic Web service clients

Abstract

Mobile devices are emerging as an attractive platform for hosting Web service clients. But unlike their "static" counterparts, mobile devices are typically connected via a wireless network introducing novel challenges related to constrained bandwidth and the sudden loss of connectivity. To overcome these challenges we propose the use of a cache for SOAP traffic that will store request/response pairs. But unlike Web caches, a SOAP cache handles traffic that encodes communication of program logics, while the traffic handled by Web caches is initiated by user actions on generally static content. A SOAP cache requires metadata providing a clear distinction between state-based, and state-altering operations in order to support the client. This paper introduces the concept of an embedded SOAP cache, highlighting the need for meta-data as the means to support it. A novel SOAP cache (CRISP) that can be embedded into the client-side WS stack or used as standalone proxy-cache, is presented and evaluated under various loads and settings.