WebPeer: A P2P-based system for publishing and discovering Web services

The use of Web services as an infrastructure of service sharing has made it possible to provide collaboration and interoperability in distributed computing environment. In this environment, service publishing and discovery are required as elementary functionalities for users to be able to locate the shared resources. The mechanism of service publishing and discovery with centralized architecture restricts the reliability and scalability of the distributed computing environment as the services and resources on the Web are fast emerging. The peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and applications, on the other hand, employ distributed resources to perform critical functions in a decentralized manner. This paper introduces Web Services Oriented Peer-to-peer (WSOP) architecture with a combination of centralized and decentralized characteristics, and presents a framework of service publishing and discovery model based on WSOP architecture. The prototype system - WebPeer implemented based on this model demonstrates the WSOP architecture can not only help to overcome the known obstacles in common Web Services infrastructure such as single node failure, but also extend the ability of the pure P2P systems, such as more efficiently locating the resources, increasing the interoperability between different P2P systems.