Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Fig. 1. The Mulan Gateway Architecture
to have one Web server for each
Mulan
host and to have one WebGateway-
agent for each
platform (it is possible to start multiple platforms on
one host). When a WebGateway-agent is started on platform startup, it is au-
tomatically connected to the platform's associated Web server. The connection
between a WebGateway-agent and its corresponding Web server features the
standard HTTP protocol and also a second type of connection that uses the
HTML5 WebSocket protocol [12], which enables bidirectional client/server com-
munication.
One particular feature of our approach is the support for - and actually also
a limitation to - RESTful Web services. The RE presentational S tate T ransfer
(REST) architecture [3] gained increased attention because of its simplicity of
publishing and consuming services over the Web. The architecture is based on
resources that identify the participants of service interactions and that are ad-
dressed with globally unique URIs 4 . This resources can be manipulated over an
uniform interface with a fixed set of operations (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE,
etc.), which are part of the underling HTTP networking protocol. Resources are
also decoupled from their representations so that their content can be accessed
in a variety of formats e.g. HTML, JSON 5 , XML or even JPEG images.
To fulfill the task of acting as a gateway between agents and Web services
as communication partners, our proposed WebGateway-agent must have the
following key features.
Mulan
1. Registration and management of agent services that are published as Web
services and vice versa (detailed description in Section 2.2).
2. A two-way translation of the supported message encodings (detailed descrip-
tion in section 2.3).
3. Routing and management of messages between the different interfaces.
The last mentioned feature has to combine the communication of both interfaces
observing their characteristics: synchronous or asynchronous communication
4 Uniform Resource Identifier.
5 Javascript Object Notation (JSON).
 
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