A Unified Conceptual Framework for Service-Oriented Computing

2008

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging programming paradigm for designing interoperable applications distributed over the network. It is based upon the concept of service which is an autonomous loosely coupled interoperable platform-independent computational entity which can be dynamically discovered and composed in order to obtain different systems which achieve different tasks. Services can be accessed by public interfaces which are standardized and stored within service registers that aim at being queried by other applications for retrieving, at run-time, a specific service for a specific task. Services can be reused and replaced depending on the execution context of the specific distributed application and they can be exploited by different application systems at the same time. E-government, e-business and e-science are some examples of the IT areas where Service Oriented Computing will be exploited in the next years and, recently, big industries and consortia like Microsoft, IBM, W3C, OASIS only to mention a few, are putting several efforts for developing tools and standards for SOC applications. So far, some frameworks like Corba [OMG], Java RMI [Sun] and Web Services have been proposed in order to deal with service oriented applications. Corba and Java RMI extend the object-oriented paradigm to network applications by supplying a framework where objects can be created and accessed remotely, whereas Web Services is the most credited technology which deals with Service Oriented Computing. The Web Services are a standardized XML-based technology [W3Ca] defined by means of several specification documents developed by different organizations, consortia and industries whose most important goal is the interoperability achievement. There are three specifications that are commonly considered the cornerstone of the Web Services technology: WSDL [W3Cf], SOAP [W3Cb] and UDDI [Oasa]. The WSDL specification deals with a language which allows for the description of a Web Service interface, the SOAP specification defines a protocol for message exchanges among Web Services and the UDDI one deals with the dynamic discovery of a Web Service. Although Service Oriented Computing raises a lot of interests in the computer science and business communities, at the present, there not exists any kind of shared formal definition for SOC nor a formalization of a service oriented programming paradigm. This fact implies that the main concepts service oriented paradigm is based upon can be extracted only from practical experiences and case studies (as in [AKR + 05, CNM06, UE]), technology documentations and informal documents released by industrial consortia like in [OAS06, W3Ce]. Although the present technologies provide powerful means for dealing with SOC application design, the fact that SOC is not precisely defined in terms of formal definitions is becoming, day by day, a strong limit for its development. Features like dynamic discovery and composition indeed, need a common understanding on the basic mechanisms SOC applications are based upon in order to be achieved by different designers by exploiting different tools. Nowadays, it is possible to observe a common interest of the industrial world and the academic one to investigate formal models for describing service oriented approach [CFNS05, WCG + 06, FLB06]. To this end, conferences and workshops are organized for sharing both industrial and academic investigations such as [KLN07, ADR07] and, recently, the European Union has funded an integrated project from which this contribute comes from, that is called SENSORIA [WCG + ] and whose aim is to develop both theoretical foundations and designing tools for SOC applications.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2015

Cloud application platforms gain popularity and have the potential to change the way applications are developed, involving composition of platform basic services. In order to enhance the developer's experience and reduce the barriers in the software development, a new paradigm of cloud application creation should be adopted. According to that developers are enabled to design their applications, leveraging multiple platform basic services, independently from the target application platforms. To this end, this paper proposes a development framework for the design of service-based cloud applications comprising two main components: the meta-model and the Platform Service Manager. The meta-model describes the building blocks which enable the construction of Platform Service Connectors in a uniform way while the Platform Service Manager coordinates the interaction of the application with the concrete service providers and further facilitates the administration of the deployed platform basic services.

IEEE Internet Computing, 2005

2003

is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. To build the service model, SOC relies on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services. However, the basic SOA does not address overarching concerns such as management, service orchestration, service transaction management and coordination, security, and other concerns that apply to all components in a services architecture. In this paper we introduce an Extended Service Oriented Architecture that provides separate tiers for composing and coordinating services and for managing services in an open marketplace by employing grid services.

International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 2008

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new computing paradigm that utilizes services as the basic constructs to support the development of rapid, low-cost and easy composition of distributed applications even in heterogeneous environments. The promise of Service-Oriented Computing is a world of cooperating services where application components are assembled with little effort into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible dynamic business processes and agile applications that may span organizations and computing platforms. The subject of Service-Oriented Computing is vast and enormously complex, spanning many concepts and technologies that find their origins in diverse disciplines that are woven together in an intricate manner. In addition, there is a need to merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organizational structures, a combination of recognizing an enterprise's pain points and the potential solutions that can be applied ...

2005

The current World-Wide Web was intended to be used by people, but most experts, including the founder of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, agree that the future WWW will have to evolve to include usage by computer systems. Moreover, the impact of computer usage will exceed that of human usage. The evolution is expected to occur through the design and deployment of Web services. The term Web services sometimes refers to services that employ a particular set of basic standards. Since these standards are all but incidental to the key concepts of services and services apply even in settings strictly different from the WWW, it is helpful to think of service-oriented computing as a more general topic.

2006

Computer, 2007

including the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for transmitting data, the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) for defining services, and the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) for orchestrating services. SOC lets developers dynamically grow application portfolios more quickly than ever before by • creating compound solutions that use internal organizational software assets, including enterprise information and legacy systems, and • combining these solutions with external components possibly residing in remote networks. The visionary promise of SOC is that it will be possible to easily assemble application components into a loosely coupled network of services that can create dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and computing platforms. 3 Such services will go well beyond simply exchanging information-the dominating mechanism for application integration today-to accessing, programming, and integrating application services encapsulated within old and new applications. Key to realizing this vision is the service-oriented architecture. SOA is a logical way of designing a software system to provide services either to end-user Service-oriented computing promotes the idea of assembling application components into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible, dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and computing platforms. An SOC research road map provides a context for exploring ongoing research activities.

AMCIS 2009 Proceedings, 2009

This paper describes a methodology for planning and executing software development projects based on the service-oriented paradigm called Service-Oriented Software Development (SOSD). This does not refer to a methodology for developing software services or service-oriented architectures. Rather, it is a method for managing the process of software development in a service-oriented approach in which the actions performed by individuals and groups are modeled as “services” which can be ...

2000