A majority of Application Programming Interfaces used to build mobile applications targeted for cloud computing are based on service oriented architecture such as REST and/or SOAP. Mobile applications are able to connect to and request services hosted on a remote cloud through interfaces. However, mobile Web services need to consider additional constraints other than standard Web services: frequent loss of connectivity, low computational resources, and low bandwidth.
Web service caching. To improve the user experience that can be hindered because of disconnection, caching and prefetching has been proposed in research [78] and [79]. This approach enables the user to continue his/her work for a period of time while in offline mode. Furthermore, caching and prefetching also gives an increased response time. In [78], CRISP, a SOAP cache that can be embedded in client side application, or deployed as a separate proxy, is introduced. In [79] a dual caching strategy is proposed, where both the nomadic client and server have caches running, storing request–response pairs. Even though the overhead of storing these pairs is considerable over time, the performance gain is significant.
