A SOAP Container Model for e-Business Messaging Requirements

Abstract

e-Business software vendors need to accommodate several standards involved in the various functions of a messaging endpoint. Vendors also need to quickly rollout the next version of a messaging protocol by reusing as much as possible of the common software. Increasingly in an e-Business context, several versions of a messaging standard will have to be concurrently operated by business partners. The current platforms for Web service or SOAP offer little support to the above. We have designed SPEF (SOAP Profile Enabling Framework) to address these engineering and business challenges. SPEF allows for coordinating the processing of SOAP modules that implement different standards (security, reliability, etc.). It has been designed as a lightweight messaging framework that behaves as a container for functional plug-ins. Message processing (either for sending or receiving) amounts to a workflow among such plug-ins. The framework relies heavily on open-source software for the basic functions common to various messaging profiles. The paper reports on the resulting integration and on experimenting with SPEF on existing SOAP standards.