Resource-oriented Computing: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of WSRF.NET

Abstract

Web services have changed the nature of distributed systems development and operation. The Grid community has begun architecting Grid systems to leverage available commercial and open-source Web services technology through the definition of “stateful resources.” These resource-oriented systems are an extension of service-oriented systems typically built using Web services in that they treat state (and the management of state) as an architectural concern rather than an application-level concern. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of WSRF.NET, a toolkit for building resource-oriented services using the Microsoft .NET platform. We describe the benefits WSRF.NET provides over “pure” .NET Web services for resource-oriented systems development, in terms of programmability (both programming-language abstractions and compile-time tooling) and improved run-time persistence/management of state. The run-time overhead of WSRF.NET is quantitatively evaluated against other technologies that can be used to add state management to Web services. We argue the core WSRF.NET primitives incur negligible overhead compared to typical domain-specific resource manipulation operations. For example, a computational simulation that lasts 10 min and reads/writes 100 medium-sized resources over those 10 min incurs only 0.46% overhead in WSRF.NET operations.