NAM: a network adaptable middleware to enhance response time of Web services

Web services are an emerging software technology that employ XML to share and exchange data. They may serve as wrappers for legacy data sources, integrate multiple remote data sources, filter information by processing queries (function shipping), etc. With those that interact with an end user, a fast response time might be the difference between a frustrated and a satisfied user. A Web service may employ a loss-less compression technique, e.g., Zip, XMill, etc., to reduce the size of an XML message in order to enhance its transmission time. This saving might be outweighed by the overhead of compressing the output of a Web service at a server and decompressing it at a client. The primary contribution of this paper is NAM, a middleware that strikes a compromise between these two factors in order to enhance response time. NAM decides when to compress data based on the available client and server processor speeds, and network characteristics. When compared with today's common practice to transmit the output of a Web service uncompressed always, our experimental results show NAM either provides similar or significantly improved response times (at times more than 90% improvement) with Internet connections that offer bandwidths ranging between 80 to 100 Mbps.