Method and apparatus for metadata driven web service mediation

Abstract

A mechanism lets a service consumer add mediation metadata in a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message and lets a service provider perform server side mediation based on the pre-defined mediation metadata. A client side mediation engine is plugged into a client SOAP engine. When the client side mediation engine receives a request message from the client SOAP engine, metadata is attached to a message header of a SOAP message and returned to the client SOAP engine. A server side mediation engine is plugged the server side mediation engine receives a SOAP message from the server SOAP engine, metadata is mapped with an appropriate adaptor and returned to the server SOAP engine.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for inserting mediation metadata into a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message based on existing Web service client engine. [0003] 2. Background Description [0004] Web Services (WS) are being considered an excellent technology to achieve business integration. Many companies are putting effort on integrating internal and external application and resources by Web Services. [0005] Web Services involve a family of related protocols to describe, deliver, and interact with services. This family can be further subdivided into groupings based on common functions and uses. The first group handles the issues of messaging, interface description, addressing and delivery. The most well-known is the messaging protocol known as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This protocol encodes messages so they can be delivered over the network using a transport protocol su...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0020] The advantages of the present invention are: [0021] 1) Improved service flexibility and adaptability, and reduction in management cost. Once a service provider publishes a service, the service management work begins. The management cost could be very high, because there are many requirements from different consumers on security policies, method signature, and data filtering. All these have nothing to do with service implementation. So one possible result is that the administrator keeps on adding different adaptor services or wrapper services for a same service implementation, fulfilling consumer's needs. Some of the requirements are short-lived or even one-off. It will be a management nightmare for service administrator. The biggest advantage of the present invention is that it enables service consumer to customize each invocation without service administrator's involvement. The integration lifecycle is shortened greatly. [0022] 2) Improved performance of service invocation. Service consumers of a same service may have different requirements on content of an invocation result. Unnecessary data transfer and serialization will happen for some consumers. This will amazingly increase overhead and greatly harm invocation performance. For consumers that have limited resources, it will be even worse because data needs to be transformed before it cam be utilized. The present invention provides a mechanism to enable server side mediation. Lots of work can be done on server side. This reduces the consumer's processing time and eliminates unnecessary network traffic. [0023] 3) Simplified service definition. The present invention enables the consumer to claim requirement on demand. The service provider can pay less attention on how the consumer will invoke service. For example, there is no need to provide same service functionality with different method signatures. Only one method is needed for one function. The service can keep concision, and the consumer will be also satisfied, because no judgment will be made on which method should be used especially when there are multiple similar methods.

[0022] 2) Improved performance of service invocation. Service consumers of a same service may have different requirements on content of an invocation result. Unnecessary data transfer and serialization will happen for some consumers. This will amazingly increase overhead and greatly harm invocation performance. For consumers that have limited resources, it will be even worse because data needs to be transformed before it cam be utilized. The present invention provides a mechanism to enable server side mediation. Lots of work can be done on server side. This reduces the consumer's processing time and eliminates unnecessary network traffic.

[0023] 3) Simplified service definition. The present invention enables the consumer to claim requirement on demand. The service provider can pay less attention on how the consumer will invoke service. For example, there is no need to provide same service functionality with different method signatures. Only one method is needed for one function. The service can keep concision, and the consumer will be also satisfied, because no judgment will be made on which method should be used especially when there are multiple similar methods.

Problems solved by technology

Although there are many specifications on Web Services, there are still many problems to be solved when putting Web Services into practice.

But there is no way for a consumer to negotiate with a Web Service to customize the Web Service at runtime.

Current Web Services engines can not provide such capabilities.

The SOAP body can not be customized.

Under most conditions, the server would not provide an additional method or mapping handler for the individual consumer.

This solution is not good enough under some conditions, such as when the consumer has a poor computation resource, or the consumer does not know how to perform such a transformation.

A consumer can not selectively retrieve an invocation result.

Transferring unnecessary data will not only cost network resources, but also increase overhead on data serialization and deserialization.

This mechanism lacks flexibility of constructing the SOAP invocation message.

First of all, the service can not provide multiple policies so the client can not select a policy.

It is impossible to achieve such encryption without configuring the service.

Security policy changing and SOAP response filtering can not be performed.

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