Reliable XML Message Management for Web Services

 

Project Director
Sven Helmer

Researchers
Tadeusz Litak

Other Project Partners 
Carl-Christian Kanne
Alexander Boehm University of Mannheim

   Project Details
Funded by EPSRC 02/2008-07/2010
grant EP/F002262/1

 

 

Keywords
Native XML processing 
Message management

Project Website
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/
~tadeusz/MMfWSproject

How do WS transactions look like today?

Traditional model

Most of today's data resides in self-contained data management islands, which are distributed world-wide and generally difficult to integrate. The interoperability of such systems is especially important for business processes spanning different departments or even organizations. Models for business processes typically involve asynchronous message exchanges within stateful transactions.

Currently, we have message-oriented middleware, queue-enabled relational database systems and native XML database systems to do this kind of data processing. This means the functionality needed for business processes is divided

Why divided functionality is undesirable?

  • WS requests have to be transformed from an XML representation into the following representations
    • the middleware's internal one
    • the one of the programming language
    • the one of the database system
    and then back... This result in degradation in performance and makes the job of the developer much harder (applying many different technologies unrelated to the application domain)
  • Divided functionality also leads to overlaps
  • Divided functionality forces adding transaction processing and recovery components, which make the systems even more unmanageable and may lead to further redundancies
  • Divided functionality results in a plethora of competing WS specifications, many of them ignoring implementation aspects or relying on other specifications not worked out yet

How do we want them to look like?

Structure of a Demaq application
Pictures courtesy of Alexander Boehm

We envision a system that

  • is transparent to the end user
  • is flexible enough to support a variety of applications
  • scales well to support a large number of participants

The aims of the project

  • To develop a flexible framework for defining specific transactional semantics
  • To consolidate the disparate XML message management functionality of today's middleware into a single native XML database system

For more technical details...

... see the Demaq project website in Mannheim

A recent paper

... we wrote on the subject can be found here