Enable SOAP to Support Service Composition in Multimedia Application

Nowadays, most of multimedia information processing application systems are still realized in the monolithic and stovepipe manner. This design pattern makes building and maintaining such multimedia systems intractable, costly and time-consumed. As a new style software design model, service oriented architecture promises a more agile solution for developing largescale Internet-based applications and has been widely accepted by the academic community and industries. However, the current service invoking method: SOAP does not apply to the multimedia area directly. This paper intends to solve this problem. Aiming at it, this paper proposes a new remote object access protocol based on SOAP which defines the correlative message format and the interaction model between the service and its client. According to the proposed approach, a service-composition-based prototype multimedia information processing system is constructed and the validity of our method is confirmed.