Using SOAP and REST web services as communication protocol for distributed evolutionary computation

Designing heterogeneous distributed systems requires of the use of tools that facilitate the deployment and the interaction between platforms. In this paper we propose using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST), two main approaches for creating applications based on distributed services, for distributed computation. Our aim is to demonstrate how they could be used to develop evolution- ary computation systems on heterogeneous platforms, taking advantage of their ability to deal with heterogeneous infrastructures and environments, and giving support for parallel implementations with a high platform flexibility. Both approaches are different and present some advantages and disadvantages for interfacing to web services: SOAP is conceptually more difficult (has a steeper learning curve) and more ”heavy-weight” than REST, although it lacks of standards support for security. The results obtained on different experiments have shown that both SOAP and REST can be used as communication protocol for distributed evolutionary computation. Results obtained are comparable, however for large amounts of data (big messages), REST communications take longer than SOAP communications.