Enterprise Resource Bus and Views in Restful Web Services

Over the past few years RESTful Web Services (WSs) have gained immense popularity over the Web Service stack (WS*) to provide WS solutions. The WSs implemented using REST are lightweight and ideally suited for consumption for devices with limited processing capabilities like mobiles and tablets due to its dependence on HTTP. This enables the system architects to leverage the well-known capabilities of HTTP to develop their systems rapidly. However, this introduces the challenges of compromised security and unmanageable systems. This research presents a novel middleware architecture called Enterprise Resource Bus for Resource Oriented systems to tackle the issues of security, access control and resource management. The middleware architecture put forward in this research is focused on remedying these issues by abstracting the logic of access control and security to the concept of view resources to be managed in the middleware. This research draws inspiration from the middleware architecture implemented in SOA called Enterprise Service Bus. Since, the implementation of ERB is inspired from ESB we have emulated some functionalities of ESB and translated them to resource oriented architecture. In addition, this research also introduces the idea of views on resources inspired from the concept of virtual relations in relational databases to provide customized view resources based on user privilege/ role in the system to control access. The middleware architecture was tested for its overhead, scalability and security features as opposed to a REST Web Service without a middleware. It can be concluded from the evaluation results that with a small overhead a secure and highly manageable REST Web Services are achievable

Combining caching with a cloud hosted proxy to support mobile consumers of RESTful services

There are numerous problems to be addressed when connecting mobile clients (e.g. smartphones and tablet devices) with Web services. These devices consume Web services via wireless channels; and as a result, developers and researchers are investigating different approaches to address challenges related to network fluctuation, latency, and low bandwidth. In addition, most of these devices have limited capabilities in terms of information processing and resource storage. This research focuses on enabling mobile devices for consuming RESTful Web services efficiently. The aforementioned problems of network instability are addressed in this research by proposing and implementing a cloud centric proxy server architecture; which is based on mirroring resources. The mirroring of the Web server’s resources on the mobile device and the proposed proxy server is achieved by exploring caching techniques. Furthermore, an evaluation is done to determine what kind of components and architecture is required for supporting resource constraint mobile devices like smartphones and tablets while connecting them with RESTful systems. By linking the caching components of the mobile devices with a cloud-hosted proxy server, it becomes possible to share caches and achieve significant performance boost for mobile consumers of the RESTful Web services

ENABLING MOBILE DEVICES TO HOST CONSUMERS AND PROVIDERS OF RESTFUL WEB SERVICES

The strong growth in the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in Enterprise Information Systems has led to growing research in the area of mobile Web services. Web services are applications that are developed based on network standards such as Services Oriented Architecture and Representational State Transfer (REST). The mobile research community mostly focused on facilitating the mobile devices as client consumers especially in heterogeneous Web services. However, with the advancement in mobile device capabilities in terms of processing power and storage, this thesis seeks to utilize these devices as hosts of REST Web services. In order to host services on mobile devices, some key challenges have to be addressed. Since data and services accessibility is facilitated by the mobile devices which communicate via unstable wireless networks, the challenges of network latency and synchronization of data (i.e. the Web resources) among the mobile participants must be addressed. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a cloud-based middleware that enables reliable communication between the mobile hosts in unreliable Wi-Fi networks. The middleware employs techniques such as message routing and Web resources state changes detection in order to push data to the mobile participants in real time. Additionally, to ensure high availability of data, the proposed middleware has a cache component which stores the replicas of the mobile hosts’ Web resources. As a result, in case a mobile host is disconnected, the Web resources of the host can be accessed on the middleware. The key contributions of this thesis are the identification of mobile devices as hosts of RESTful Web services and the implementation of middleware frameworks that support mobile communication in unreliable networks