Distributed XML Processing: Theory and Applications

Basic message processing tasks, such as well-formedness checking and grammar validation, common in Web service messaging, can be off-loaded from the service providers' own infrastructures. The traditional ways to alleviate the overhead caused by these tasks is to use firewalls and gateways. However, these single processing point solutions do not scale well. To enable effective off-loading of common processing tasks, the authors introduce the Prefix Automata SyStem - PASS, a middleware architecture which distributively processes XML payloads of web service SOAP messages during their routing towards Web servers. PASS is based on a network of automata, where PASS-nodes independently but cooperatively process parts of the SOAP message XML payload.