Implementing Service Oriented Architecture using Http is a horrible idea
Service Oriented Architecture is a commonly used design pattern in distributed and enterprise applications. It involves the creation and use of independent services that work together to produce the desired result. The most important benefits, of course, are separation of concerns and the ability to scale each service independent of others, leading to a clean, modular design.
A common problem faced during the design of a SOA system is the choice of communication protocol. Ideally we want our services to communicate with each other with minimum communication overhead. This involves:
- Low latency
- High throughput
Many open source protocols are available for use in SOA. Some of them also provide client/server de-serialization/serialization libraries to make your job easier. Examples are:
Some people also like to use SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC etc. I have attempted to cover the (mis)use of HTTP/REST as a SOA protocol in this article.
Consider 2 clients accessing a web front-end for some data. The web frontend server is responsible for some preprocessing (authentication etc.) and post-processing (aggregation etc.) tasks. The heavy lifting is done by our backend service.
Let us say Client1 came first and requested for Data1. The web frontend performs some preprocessing on the request and forwards it to our backend service over HTTP. Meanwhile Client2 came along and requested for Data2. Now, if our backend service has not yet returned with Client1’s request, the web frontend cannot effectively re-use (multiplex) the TCP connection between itself and our backend service since the HTTP protocol requires servers to return responses in the same order as requests. Our web frontend will need to create a new TCP connection for each concurrent request which is extremely wasteful. SPDY has tried to address the multiplexing issue but it may be a bit away from production grade quality yet.
Another problem is HTTP/1.1’s use of ASCII. Sure it makes things easier to debug but again is wasteful in SOA. Ideally we want a tightly packed binary protocol.
HTTP/1.1’s statelessness is another cause of worries. It is simply wasteful to send the same set of headers for similar requests. Again, SPDY and HTTP/2.0 are trying header compression and may be worth looking into.
Conclusion
HTTP/1.1 is an excellent protocol for a traditional client/server model. It is an ASCII protocol, hence it is easy to debug. It is fairly well known, has a number of supporting libraries in almost all major languages and provides a useful set of primitives and verbs for almost all of your data transfer needs. However, please do not use it if you are creating a production grade SOA application.