Architecting distributed Web applications: A graph-oriented approach

This paper presents a novel approach, called WebGOP, for modeling and implementing the architecture of Web-based distributed applications using a graph-oriented programming (GOP) model. With WebGOP, the architecture of a distributed Web application system is represented by a user-specified graph, and the components communicate and coordinate with each other with a set of operations over the graph. The architecture graph is reified as an explicit object which is distributed over the network. It provides a graph-oriented context for the execution of each component pertaining to the application. Developers can specialize the type of the graph to represent a particular style of architectures. The proposed approach also has built-in support for flexible and dynamic architectures, including both planned and unplanned dynamic reconfiguration of distributed applications. A formal model based on edNCE graph grammar is proposed for WebGOP graphs. And a prototype of WebGOP implemented on top of SOAP is introduced to verify the feasibility of authors' approach. Performance of the implementation is evaluated and the evaluation results are presented.