Architecting and implementing distributed Web applications using the graph‐oriented approach

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a graph‐oriented framework, called WebGOP, for architecture modeling and programming of Web‐based distributed applications. WebGOP is based on the graph‐oriented programming (GOP) model, under which the components of a distributed program are configured as a logical graph and implemented using a set of operations defined over the graph. WebGOP reshapes GOP with a reflective object‐oriented design, which provides powerful architectural support in the World Wide Web environment. In WebGOP, the architecture graph is reified as an explicit object which itself is distributed over the network, providing a graph‐oriented context for the execution of distributed applications. The programmer can specialize the type of graph to represent a particular architecture style tailored for an application. WebGOP also has built‐in support for flexible and dynamic architectures, including both planned and unplanned dynamic reconfiguration of distributed applications. We describe the WebGOP framework, a prototypical implementation of the framework on top of SOAP, and a performance evaluation of the prototype. The prototype demonstrated the feasibility of our approach. Results of the performance evaluation showed that the overhead introduced by WebGOP over SOAP is reasonable and acceptable. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.