Combining Object-Oriented Design and SOA with Remote Objects over Web Services

Current approaches of accessing stateful resources via SOAP Web services do not provide a standardized way to use program objects (classes). In this article, we show how the interface of an object-oriented class can be expressed using WSDL. This approach enables a program object to be used in a distributed environment by accessing its Web service interface. The set of Web services associated with a class define a Remote Object over Web Service (ROWS). A ROWS object can be used to facilitate the simultaneous use of the concepts of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Distributed Object Architectures (DOA). In this context, we show how ROWS objects can be utilized in BPEL. Beyond that, we present a ROWS implementation that is suitable to serve as a standalone distributed object middleware. In a case study, we show how classes that were written in Java can be made accessible remotely through the ROWS technology.