StoRHm: a protocol adapter for mapping SOAP based Web Services to RESTful HTTP format

A 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. The inherent advantage of such a transition is the visibility of RESTful HTTP messages to Web intermediaries such as caches. In contrast, SOAP messages are opaque, which disables Web intermediaries. While both approaches can use HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for message transfer, the paradigms contrast sharply. SOAP uses an interface specific approach whereas RESTful HTTP uses a Uniform Interface approach. SOAP marks up its payload with eXtensible Markup Language (XML) whereas in certain situations RESTful HTTP requires no XML. We present the disadvantages of the SOAP approach and outline how the RESTful HTTP approach solves these issues. We present results showing opaque SOAP messages transformed into transparent RESTful HTTP messages. We present StoRHm (SOAP to RESTful HTTP mapping), a protocol adapter which maps SOAP messages to RESTful HTTP format.