A Framework for Composing SOAP, Non-SOAP and Non-Web Services

Abstract

Recently, there is a trend on developing mobile applications based on service-oriented architecture in numerous application domains, such as telematics and smart home. Although efforts have been made on developing composite SOAP services, little emphasis has been put on invoking and composing a combination of SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services into a composite process to execute complex tasks on various mobile devices. Main challenges are two-fold: one is how to invoke and compose heterogeneous Web services with various protocols and content types, including SOAP, RESTful, and OSGi services; and the other is how to integrate non-Web services, like Web contents and mobile applications, into a composite service process. In this work, we propose an approach to invoking and composing SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services with two key features: an extended BPEL engine bundled with adapters to enable direct invocation and composition of SOAP, RESTful and OSGi services based on Adapter pattern; and two transformation mechanisms devised to enable conversion of Web contents and Android activities into OSGi services. In the experimental evaluations, we demonstrate network traffic and turnaround time of our approach are better than those of the traditional ones.