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Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) for J2ME – version 0.1

The Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) is a set of specifications to enable stateful Web Services. The WSRF Primer document gives a quick introduction what WSRF is all about. WSRF is heavily used in Grid Computing. The Globus Toolkit for example, an “open source software toolkit used for building grids”, exposes most of it’s Grid functionality as WSRF-based Web Services.

During a school project I was researching different possibilities to connect to a Grid System with mobile devices. It seemed to be logical that most of the approaches used a proprietary protocol (over plain HTTP) between the mobile client and a gateway, which in turn translated the proprietary protocol into standards-based WSRF calls to the actual grid system. The main reasons for using “lightweight” proprietary protocol instead of using WSRF-based Web Services directly were said to be the “constrained resources” (such as low bandwith, limited processing power, less memory, small display, etc…) of mobile devices, which I believe is only partially true with current mobile devices.

To cut the long story short, there are no WSRF implementations available for J2ME, thus I had to develop one from scratch. Well, not totally from scratch, because WSRF 4 J2ME builds upon the kSOAP2 API. The class diagram above (click to enlarge) gives an overview of the WSRF 4 J2ME. For more details, source code and a J2ME sample application please refer to the wsrf4j2me project on Google Code. The sample application is located here (note: you don’t need to have Globus Toolkit 4 completely installed – the Java WS Core container is sufficient to test the application):

• WSRF_Midlet.jad
• WSRF_Midlet.jar