Employing dynamic object offloading as a design breakthrough for SOA adoption

Abstract

In several application contexts, Web Services adoption is limited due to performance issues. Design methods and migration strategies from legacy systems often propose the adoption of coarse-grained interfaces to reduce the number of interactions between clients and servers. This is an important design concern since marshaling and transferring small parts of complex business objects might entail sensible delays, especially in high latency networks. Nevertheless, transferring large data in coarse-grained interactions might bring useless data on the client side, whereas a small part of the transferred object is actually used. This paper presents a novel approach to extend existing Web services run-time supports with dynamic offloading capabilities based on an adaptive strategy that allows servers to learn clients behaviors at runtime. By exploiting this approach, service based applications can improve their performances, as experimental results show, without any invasive change to existing Web services and clients. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.