HTTP Mailbox - Asynchronous RESTful Communication
This addresses the need for more flexible HTTP communication in web applications, such as human-assisted web preservation, but appears incremental as it builds on existing RESTful concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of enabling asynchronous RESTful HTTP communication with full HTTP methods and broadcast/multicast semantics, achieving high throughput on 1,000 concurrent requests and a 0.01% error rate in evaluation.
We describe HTTP Mailbox, a mechanism to enable RESTful HTTP communication in an asynchronous mode with a full range of HTTP methods otherwise unavailable to standard clients and servers. HTTP Mailbox allows for broadcast and multicast semantics via HTTP. We evaluate a reference implementation using ApacheBench (a server stress testing tool) demonstrating high throughput (on 1,000 concurrent requests) and a systemic error rate of 0.01%. Finally, we demonstrate our HTTP Mailbox implementation in a human assisted web preservation application called "Preserve Me".