A Comprehensive Assessment and Comparison of Asynchronous Invocation Patterns and Frameworks

Asynchronous invocations are an important functionality in the context of distributed object frameworks, because in many situations clients should not be blocked during remote invocations. There should be a loose coupling between clients and remote services. Popular web service frameworks, such as Apache Axis, offer only synchronous invocations (over HTTP). An alternative are messaging protocols but these implement a different communication paradigm. When client asynchrony is not supported, client developers have to build asynchronous invocations on top of the synchronous invocation facility. But this is tedious, error-prone, and might result in different remote invocation styles used within the same application. In this paper the challenges of asynchronous invocation of web services is discussed. Besides, we have investigated and compared a set of client asynchrony patterns and frameworks

Keywords:

web service , asynchronous invocation , framework , pattern