A Mediator-Based Approach to Resolving Interface Heterogeneity of Web Services
Philipp Leitner, Florian Rosenberg, Anton Michlmayr, Andreas Huber, Schahram Dustdar · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks · 2009
In theory, service-oriented architectures are based on the idea of increasing flexibility in the selection of internal and external business partners using loosely-coupled services. However, in practice this flexibility is limited by the fact that partners need not only to provide the same service, but to do so via virtually the same interface in order to actually be interchangeable easily. Invocation-level mediation may be used to overcome this issue — by using mediation interface differences can be resolved transparently at runtime. In this chapter we discuss the basic ideas of mediation, with a focus on interface-level mediation. We show how interface mediation is integrated into our dynamic Web service invocation framework Daios , and present three different mediation strategies, one based on structural message similarity, one based on semantically annotated WSDL, and one which is embedded into the VRESCo SOA runtime, a larger research project with explicit support for service mediation.