User-hosted SOA infrastructure over XMPP

Abstract

The principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) argue for the design of systems composed of re-usable coarse-grained software components which consume and provide services in a service ecosystem. Despite being commonly mentioned in an enterprise context, these are very present in the web - most web applications expose some of their data via APIs, which are then used by other web and mobile applications. The proliferation of user-owned connected devices has brought value to mobile application developers which can make use of locally-available sensors and capabilities and send their information to the web, centralizing the data flows. A more distributed approach would have device capabilities offered directly on the network as services hosted by the user. These pervasive user-hosted services could be made discoverable and available over a public federated service infrastructure. The infrastructure would provide transport over an identity layer, where endpoints are addressed by their identities instead of network identifiers, and on top of which services can be exposed to be consumed by trusted friends or anonymous users, as the hosting user prefers. The work presented in this paper explores the possibility of implementing a distributed social SOA over Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It differs from traditional SOA because it attempts to counter relative centralization of the web, in favour of a fully-distributed service ecosystem where each peer can behave both as service consumer and provider. Finally, an analysis is done on how suitable XMPP is to serve as a base protocol for such infrastructure.