Reverse SOAP Proxy
A reverse SOAP proxy can expose Web Services from an internal network to the internet. As shown in figure 1, direct access from the internet may be prohibited for security reasons. A reverse proxy can pretend to the client it is the server. But it is an intermediary that routes in-bound traffic in a secure way to the internal network. It works on the application level and therefore knows something about HTTP and SOAP. Based on the request data, a reverse proxy can make a decision to reject or to forward a request. It can also dispatch the requests to different internal services deployment on different hosts. To the outside it looks like all services were deployed on the same host. A reverse proxy can also be used as a loadbalancer for Web Services. To the outside one service endpoint is exposed, but the incoming requests are dispatched to a cluster of application servers.
- There is no need to change the source code of the client.
- All HTTP requests of a client can be routed through the monitor without touching the endpoint addresses of the services.
Figure1: