WorldTravel: A testbed for service-oriented applications

Abstract

This paper describes the "WorldTravel" service-oriented application and testbed. The purpose of the testbed is to provide to researchers an open source venue for experimenting with and evaluating ideas, methods, and implementation options for service-oriented architectures and applications. Built upon standard service technologies, the WorldTravel testbed offers implementations of services and service interactions specific to the WorldTravel application, comprised of (1) a substantive back-end that includes a simple airline pricing/ticketing engine, with a representative flight database, both structured similarly to those used by companies actually offering such services, (2) a front-end for travel services interacting with mid-tier request processing and routing services, and (3) load traces from the corresponding business applications that are used to drive the use of WorldTravel and its services. We call WorldTravel a testbed rather than benchmark because its design permits extension at both the front-end, e.g., to add interesting new services like weather information about possible travel destinations, and at the back-end, e.g., to add payment services. This paper identifies the need for testbeds like WorldTravel, considers the attributes required of such testbeds, describes our current testbed in detail, and presents an initial testbed evaluation. It also describes the actual production-quality system on which WorldTravel is based. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.