WSMB: a middleware for enhanced Web services interoperability

Abstract. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web services is considered as the state-of-the-art approach to support interoperability between distributed sys-tems and therefore facilitates complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems both within the enterprise and for cross-organizational collabo-ration. Message-based interactions are seen as the core building block in this new document-centric computing paradigm. Building SOA-based applications is a com-plex undertaking, design patterns and frameworks have an important role to play to ease the process and to provide high interoperability. This paper reviews interop-erability challenges and possible solutions to address them then it reports our ex-periments with Web Services Message Bus (WSMB), a lightweight service-oriented integration framework for dependable Web services interactions using broker pat-tern. The main goal that guided the framework’s deign is to maximize interoperabil-ity through a scalable mediation service to cope with the inherit heterogeneity of systems involved. We discuss the system architecture, some implementation issues and report our experiences in building WSMB as well as some initial performance re-sults. 1