Engineering Push-based Web Services

Much of the content of popular Internet information sources is highly dynamic: urgent in nature and sometimes relevant only for a short time. The typical approach to querying such dynamic sources is polling for updates often. This strains the traditional pull-based Internet and wastes network resources on transmitting redundant information. This paper focuses on how to structure the Internet to avoid much of the unnecessary client-server interactions. To that end, we extend the API of popular existing Internet services through push-based Web service wrappers. These wrappers use the API of, for instance, Google, but provide functionality that is richer. Initial experience shows that major performance gains can be achieved through this approach.