Facilitating Complex Web Service Interactions through a Tuplespace Binding

The SOAP messaging framework, as one key technology of the Web service technology standard stack, defines a standardized message format for Web service interactions, a set of rules governing their processing and a mechanism that describes how SOAP messages can be transmitted over different network transport protocols, called SOAP bindings. The most prominent example for a Web service transport today, is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which however suffers from certain drawbacks such as being inherently synchronous in nature and not providing decoupling of message sender and receiver in reference or time. In this paper, we present tuplespace technology as an alternative Web service transport that is characterized by a number of properties that are not found in current Web service transports: asynchronism, strong decoupling of sender and receiver and support for advanced message exchange patterns, such as one-to-many interactions, directly on the transport level. We describe the representation of SOAP messages in tuple form and exemplify how to use the operations provided by the tuplespace interface to realize certain Web service message exchange patterns.1