HTTP Mailbox - Asynchronous RESTful Communication

TL;DR

HTTP Mailbox introduces an asynchronous RESTful communication mechanism enabling full HTTP method support, broadcast, and multicast, demonstrated with high throughput and low error rate in a web preservation application.

Contribution

It presents a novel HTTP Mailbox system that extends RESTful HTTP communication to asynchronous modes with broadcast and multicast capabilities.

Findings

High throughput with 1,000 concurrent requests

Systemic error rate of 0.01%

Successful application in web preservation

Abstract

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".