STORHM: A SEMANTICALLY AUTOMATED PROTOCOL ADAPTER FOR MAPPING SOAP WEB SERVICES TO RESTFUL HTTP FORMAT

An automated protocol adapter ideally suited to enable enterprises to gradually transition from SOAP Web Services to RESTful HTTP Web Services without impacting existing clients is presented in this paper. While both approaches can use HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for message transfer, their paradigms contrast sharply. SOAP uses an interface specific approach and a gateway URI; whereas RESTful HTTP uses a Uniform Interface approach and unique URI's. We present the disadvantages of the SOAP approach and outline how the RESTful HTTP approach solves these issues. We present StoRHm (SOAP to RESTful HTTP mapping), a protocol adapter, which leverages the Semantic Web to automate the mapping of SOAP messages to RESTful HTTP format. The inherent advantage of such a transition is the visibility of RESTful HTTP messages to Web intermediaries such as caches.