SOAP over JMS support for the Stuttgarter workflow machine

Web services constitute the function layer of the two-level programming model that is characteristic for workflow-based applications in a heterogeneous and distributed environment. The model involves two parts. First descriptions of business process models defining the sequence and activities that are carried out during the execution of the business processes (programming in the large). Second the individual components implementing the various activities (programming in the small). The Stuttgarter Workflow Machine (SWoM) is a workflow management system (WFMS) implementing partially the WS-BPEL standard for the business process model description. The purpose of the system is to manage the life cycle of business processes, to navigate through the associated process models and invoke the appropriate web services implementing activities. The purpose of this diploma thesis was to architect, design and implement enhancements for the Stuttgarter Workflow machine to support the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) with the Java Message Service (JMS) as underlying transport alternative to the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The document describes and illustrates the necessary tasks enabling the participating web services to exchange messages via persistent message queuing providing more reliability and robustness for the transmission of business data. The work covers the creation and administration of the necessary Java Messaging Service (JMS) resources. Furthermore the automated generation of components in particular message-driven beans performing the message consumption and components for the invocation of partner web services via JMS messages. The approach used for the implementation includes distinct queues for each process model for scalability. A main focus is on the end to end message dispatching from individual web services participating in a business process instance to another. As a result it is shown that it is possible to deploy process model descriptions in WS-BPEL and generated components on WebSphere as application server automatically allowing the Stuttgarter Workflow Machine to rely on the Java Message Service as message oriented middleware (MOM)

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public's confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.This work was financed under project DPI2015-68602-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), UPV/EHU under project PPG17/56 and GV/EJ under recognized research group IT914-16

Enhanced SOAP Performance for low bandwidth environments

It is desirable that SOAP performs efficiently in environments where there are a large number of transactions. However, SOAP is based on XML and therefore inherits XML's disadvantage of having voluminous messages. Firstly, the performance of different SOAP bindings is investigated. A benchmark of different SOAP bindings in wireless environments demonstrates the unsuitability of HTTP and TCP bindings in limited bandwidth environments. UDP is recommended as an alternative transport protocol for SOAP. Secondly, the thesis examines the use of multicast in reducing the traffic caused by SOAP messages in low bandwidth environments to deal with challenges described. A novel SOAP-level multicast protocol based on the similarity of SOAP messages, called SMP (Similarity-based SOAP Multicast Protocol), is proposed. In particular, issues of traffic, network optimization, response time and scalability are investigated. Lastly, two extensions of SMP are proposed to further improve the performance of SMP. SMP's extensions are two algorithms, greedy and incremental tc-SMP, for traffic-constrained similarity-based SOAP multicast. Tc-SMP optimizes network traffic by building its own spanning trees instead of using the one built by traditional methods, such as Dijkstra's algorithm. A new client is added to a tc-SMP tree through an existing tc-SMP node that causes minimal additional traffic for that connection. Detailed analytical models and experimental evaluations of the proposed methods demonstrate that combining SOAP messages of similar content and multicasting them as aggregated messages can significantly lower total network traffic. These improvements are advantageous for Web service applications that involve a high number of simultaneous similar transactions such as stock quotes, weather and sport event reports

Analysis of Web Services on J2EE Application Servers

The Internet became a standard way of exchanging business data between B2B and B2C applications and with this came the need for providing various services on the web instead of just static text and images. Web services are a new type of services offered via the web that aid in the creation of globally distributed applications. Web services are enhanced e-business applications that are easier to advertise and easier to discover on the Internet because of their flexibility and uniformity. In a real life scenario it is highly difficult to decide which J2EE application server to go for when deploying a enterprise web service. This thesis analyzes the various ways by which web services can be developed & deployed. Underlying protocols and crucial issues like EAI (enterprise application integration), asynchronous messaging, Registry tModel architecture etc have been considered in this research. This paper presents a report by analyzing what various J2EE application servers provide by doing a case study and by developing applications to test functionality

Web Service Reliability for Deactivation and Decommissioning Knowledge Management Information Tool (D&D KM-IT) Vendor Management with Mobile Applications

This thesis presents the Knowledge Management Information Tool (KM-IT) Vendor Management Web Service and its reliability features. KM-IT is a web-based knowledge management information tool for the deactivation and decommissioning (D&D) user community. The Vendor Management (VM) module provides a directory service for searching D&D vendors. Clients have an increasing need to integrate and display the vendor information in their own applications. As such, this study proposes Web Services technology to provide VM access to clients. Moreover, when clients access information, particularly via mobile applications, they can encounter different failures that may occur on the network or the server. Such problems require fault tolerance in the VM Service. This study examines various reliability standards and selects the WS-ReliableMessaging standard as the best-suited approach to implement the reliability features for the VM Service. Implementation evaluation confirms that the KM-IT VM Service can effectively tolerate different types of failures