Web services are not really suitable for implementing applications with non-standard communication requirements,such as e.g. applications with data streaming and/or realtime requirements, applications depending on the transfer of large files, and legacy applications with complex message exchange patterns. This paper presents a communication policy for web services based on WS-Policy, which enables the description of real-time and data streaming requirements, of file transfers, and of protocols and clients used by legacy applications. It is used in addition to the WSDL description of a service, and thus complements the service description by exposing the protocols used by the applications for the various requirements. By investigating a video-on-demand application, several limits of web service technologies and the benefits of using the communication policy to describe such requirements are illustrated.
Index Terms:
Web Services, communication policy, streaming, real-time, legacy, specification
Citation:
Steffen Heinzl, Markus Mathes, Bernd Freisleben, "A Web Service Communication Policy for Describing Non-standard Application Requirements," saint, pp.40-47, 2008 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet, 2008