Towards service composition middleware embedded in web browser

Due to the rich user experience and Internet-wide scalability, more and more Web-delivered services are assembled in web browsers and the resulted service composition itself is also running in the browsers. Today's popular service composition environments embedded in web browsers mainly focus on the experiences of end-users or non-professional users. The solutions for other composition issues, e.g. service access and interaction enablement, are private and tightly coupled with the user interfaces. In this paper, we propose a new type of middleware, which is embedded in web browsers and encapsulates reusable solutions for common problems to the composition of Web-delivered services, including a container for component instances, a set of communication mechanisms for interactions within the browser, between the browser and server, between the browser and local resources. Based on iCM, different service composition environments preferred by different users can be constructed easily with high quality. In the evaluation, we implement a prototype of the browser middleware, called Internetware Client Middleware (iCM), construct a new service composition environment, called iMashup, with iCM and compare iMashup with some popular environments. The evaluation results demonstrates that iMashup has richer composition capabilities, supports more types of web browsers, consumes smaller memory and gains practical scalability. These observations show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed middleware.