AN ADAPTER FOR MAPPING PLAIN OLD XML (POX) WEB SERVICES TO RESTFUL HTTP

An adapter ideally suited to enable enterprises to gradually transition from Plain Old XML (POX) based Web Services to RESTful Web Services without impacting existing clients is presented in this paper. The inherent advantages of such a transition is the ability of REST to overcome the message opacity (and XML verbosity) currently associated with POX implementations. While both approaches use HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for transferring their messages, their paradigms contrast sharply. POX uses an interface specific approach whereas REST uses an Uniform Interface approach. POX marks up its payload with eXtensible Markup Language (XML) whereas in certain situations REST requires no XML. We present the issues of the POX approach and outline how the RESTful approach solves these issues. We present results showing opaque, verbose POX messages being transformed into transparent messages which are up to 57% smaller. We present an adapter gateway which maps POX messages to RESTful HTTP format.