Canadian Journal of Pure & Applied Sciences

Abstract: The fresh ambition to make computers seamlessly interoperable in dynamic and heterogeneous systems triggered the rush on Web Services by the computing community. We established that this rush may lead us into shambles unless we address the issue of poor scalability of Web Services. We have examined the technology to unveil the root cause of its poor scalability and figure out a key to improving it. Web Service support for replication was identified as one such key. We examined available replication schemes with a view to determining the one most suited to Web Services. The three tier replication scheme appears to have stood out. We have explored the possibility of making Web Service support this replication scheme in building scalable Web Services solution by application programmers. The result is proposed Replication Oriented Architecture (ROA) for building Web Services solution. ROA is unique in its application of replication to Web service in that it employs a non conventional replication technique; it is server side oriented and transparent to consumer applications. ROA solutions therefore free Web Services consumers from issues of Web Services server selection schemes. This proposed architecture however has some critical issues which were also exposed.