An end-to-end caching protocol for web services

Web services have become an extremely popular technology for application integration due to its platform independent nature. However the use of web services has been limited in some areas mainly because of poor performance. Most web service usage scenarios fall into a client server architectural pattern, where a server component serves multiple clients. Caching is considered to be a well-known performance boosting approach in these types of applications. Even though web services have many similarities with the web, it is not easy to apply the same caching strategies used in the web in the context of web services. One key reason for this is that the request XML messages do not reveal enough information about the service semantics. The intention of this research is to implement an end-to-end caching protocol for web services, similar to HTTP caching. The proposed scheme consists of two caches - at the server and at each client. A set of SOAP headers similar to cache control HTTP headers will be used for managing this caching mechanism.