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 and author’s observations are presented.