As web services gain acceptance in the e-Science community, some of their shortcomings have begun to appear. A significant challenge is to find reliable and efficient methods to transfer large data between web services. This paper describes the problem of scalable data transport between web services, and proposes a solution: the development of a modular Server/Client library that uses SOAP as a control channel while the actual data transport is accomplished by various protocol implementation, as well as a simple API that developers can use for data-intensive applications. Apart from file transport, the proposed approach offers the facility of direct data streaming between web services, an approach that could benefit workflow execution time by creating a data pipeline between web services. Finally, the performance and usability of this library is evaluated, under the indexing application that the Adaptive Information Disclosure Application (AIDA) Toolkit offers as a Web Service.
[bibtex key=IEEE:2008:koulouzis]