Using a cloud-centric middleware to enable mobile hosting of web services

The unceasing growth and divergence of the mobile landscape has led to the use of smartphone and tablet devices in consuming Web services in enterprises. However, in heterogeneous Web services, the shift from the mobile client consumer approach to the mobile service hosting approach has received little attention; with no attention given to RESTful mobile services hosting. With the advancement of storage and processing capabilities of these devices; coupled with the high availability of the Web, this paper focuses on the use of the mobile devices as hosts of Web services in an E-health domain. To achieve this goal, the challenges of latency and Web resources state change synchronization has to be addressed to ensure data reliability; since service accessibility is facilitated by the mobile devices which communicate via unstable wireless networks. In this paper, a cloud-centric middleware technique is employed to enable access to the mobile hosts. The paper presents mobile hosting of light-weight Web services which is deployed in a real world system, and proposes a middleware platform for the update management of Web resources state changes in unreliable wireless networks. Our current implemented project, called SOPHRA, which is a joint E-health project with the Geriatrics Ward at the City Hospital in Saskatoon, supports mobile communication over Wi-Fi using HTTP.