A portable interceptor mechanism for SOAP frameworks

• The application of interception approach is reviewed in a few application domains.
• A portable interceptor mechanism (PIM) is proposed for SOAP frameworks.
• This PIM is evaluated against ISO/IEC 9126 to ensure its functional completeness.
• The proposed PIM is proven feasible for SOAP frameworks via several field studies.

An interceptor is a generic architecture pattern, and has been used to resolve specific issues in a number of application domains. Many standard platforms such as CORBA also provide interception interfaces so that an interceptor developed for a specific application can become portable across systems running on the same platform. SOAP frameworks are commonly used platforms to build Web Services. However, there is no standard way to build interceptors portable across current SOAP frameworks, although, some of them provide proprietary interceptor solution within individual framework, such as Axis, XFire, and etc. In this paper, we propose the portable interceptor mechanism (PIM) consisting of a set of application programming interfaces (API) on SOAP engine, a core component of a SOAP framework. An interceptor is able to receive messages passing through the SOAP framework from the SOAP engine via these APIs. Furthermore, the proposed PIM facilitates run-time lifecycle management of interceptors that is a crucial feature to many application domains but is not fully supported by CORBA standard. For concept proving, we implement the proposed PIM on two popular SOAP frameworks, namely, Axis and XFire. We also discuss a number of implementation issues including the performance and reliability of PIM.