Transparent Integration of Meta-Services in Service Oriented Architecture - TIMSOA
Coordinating Institution:
CRP Gabriel Lippmann
Contracting Partner(s):
CRP Henri Tudor ,
Lorraine Laboratory of IT Research and its Applications (LORIA), Nancy (F)
From: 01/04/2009
To: 31/03/2011
Budget: 345,000.00€
Contact(s):
Biri Nicolas
Summary
Service Oriented Computing and Service Oriented Architecture describe a way to design business architecture, with a strong focus onto IT. A key objective of the underlying concepts consists in increasing the flexibility and agility of the business, and to align IT and the business needs. The increase of the technical complexity constitutes a drawback as soon as a heterogeneous composition of services is considered. Due to this increased complexity, the adaptability of existing production services decreases, which again has a negative impact onto the flexibility and adaptability of the complete IT landscape. The importance of maintainability, flexibility and agility directly depends on the size and relevance of the deployed services and increases with the maturity of the operational SOAs.
The project addresses these aspects by defining an adequate architectural framework. An interesting research topic to address these issues consists in introducing meta-services into SOAs. Meta-services do not offer business operations, but act as helper services trying to optimize and simplify business services and their design. Concrete instances of meta-services can be for instance orchestration services, offering service composition functionalities, or monitoring services, controlling the correct execution of other services, and so on. Meta-services centralize common functions used by multiple business services. They help to improve the efficiency and flexibility of SOAs and also have a positive impact onto occurring costs. The purpose of TIMSOA is to develop a platform that facilitates the deployment of meta-services, as well of the evolution of existing ones. We are also conscious that the notion of “facilitate evolution” might be subjective, that’s why we also want to develop a test case and to define evaluation criteria to assess this criterion. During the first year, we have shown how meta-services can be apply to security, with an obvious gain in flexibility and governance of the presented solution. We have also studied practical examples, in collaboration with the CRP-HT, in order to define ad-hoc scenarios that assess different level of flexibility of an SOA. We have isolated a few set of scenarios and we concentrate our work on the realisation of a test platform, that can be use to assess flexibility of an SOA solution. The work on the definition of flexibility metrics is on-going after a phase of bibliography. The definition of a module that integrates an aspects-language in a previously defined SOA platform.
Refereed Scientific Publications:
Baouab, A., Perrin, O., Biri, N., & Godart, C. (2009). Security Meta-Services Orchestration Architecture. IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference - APSCC.
Other Publications:
None