Proposed solution for WS-I Web Services:

The default solution for asynchronous services in the WS stack is to use callback operations . In the bioinformatics domain we can not assume that client would have the possibility to expose an external service interface, this does not seem like a viable solution for now.

A solution based on polling is more light-weight since it does not assume that a client exposes a service interface. As there are no available standards for such an interface, we are free to define one. One solution is to use the soaplab async. interface. This is  described in the soaplab documentation, but would be useful if it were defined in a wsdl file, which could be reused and then imported into the wsdl of the service you wish to provide a asyc interface to (see example below ).