Extending POP-C++ to Integrate Web Services into Parallel Objects

A Grid environment is a collection of a large number of geographically distributed resources managed by various organizations. And it is considered as a powerful computing infrastructure to solve large and complex problems. To support the software development, until now, many Grid programming languages have been investigated. Most of them use proprietary protocols or TCP-based protocols to communicate. Connectivity, especially the network firewall and the heterogeneous interoperability is one of the big issues for Grid applications and development tools. POP-C++, which is a programming language adding a new type of “parallel object” to C++, also faces the same problem in its communication protocol which heavily based on TCP socket/XDR. This research aims at providing POP-C++ a novel mechanism for objects to choose a suitable protocol and message encoding to communicate among them. Web Services, which is a broadly accepted standard, is a good choice because it is widely used in structuring interactions among distributed software services. Its communications mostly use SOAP buffer over HTTP protocol which is normally allowed in all firewalls. In this paper, we discuss an extension of POP-C++ toward HTTP/SOAP to overcome the connectivity issue.