WebGOP: A framework for architecting and programming dynamic distributed Web applications

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach, called WebGOP, for architecture modeling and programming of web-based distributed applications. WebGOP uses the graph-oriented programming (GOP) mode, under which the components of a distributed program are configured as a logical graph and implemented using a set of operations defined over the graph. WebGOP extends the application of GOP to the World Wide Web environment and provides more powerful architectural support. In WebGOP, the architecture graph is reified as an explicit object which itself is distributed over the network providing a graph-oriented context for the execution of distributed applications. The programmer can specialize the type of a graph to represent a particular architecture style tailored for an application. WebGOP also has built-in support for flexible and dynamic architectures, including dynamic reconfiguration. We describe the WebGOP framework, a prototypical implementation of the framework on top of SOAP, and performance evaluation of the prototype. Results of the performance evaluation showed that the overhead introduced by WebGOP over SOAP is reasonable and acceptable.