Enhancing the Caching of Web Service Responses on Wireless Clients

Contrary to simple Web content, standard Web services do not offer their clients the possibility to use cached information without the risk that it may be out-of-date. This feature has not been worth its costs in realistic Web service usage scenarios until now. However, its absence may pose restrictions and impede possible benefits in a future scenario, where mediators are both willing and able to effectively minimize the amount of wirelessly transmitted data in the Internet of Services. This paper describes how developments in the Internet of Services start to motivate the automatic enablement of safe (i.e., always up-to-date) client-side caching for Web services. It presents our solution for generically adding this feature to any Web service, and, based on new experiments, reveals the limits beyond which the approach can offer significant benefits.