Leveraging service-oriented business applications to a rigorous rule-centric dynamic behavioural architecture.

Today’s market competitiveness and globalisation are putting pressure on organisations to join their efforts, to focus more on cooperation and interaction and to add value to their businesses. That is, most information systems supporting these cross-organisations are characterised as service-oriented business applications, where all the emphasis is put on inter-service interactions rather than intra-service computations. Unfortunately for the development of such inter-organisational service-oriented business systems, current service technology proposes only ad-hoc, manual and static standard web-service languages such as WSDL, BPEL and WS-CDL [3, 7]. The main objective of the work reported in this thesis is thus to leverage the development of service-oriented business applications towards more reliability and dynamic adaptability, placing emphasis on the use of business rules to govern activities, while composing services. The best available software-engineering techniques for adaptability, mainly aspect-oriented mechanisms, are also to be integrated with advanced formal techniques. More specifically, the proposed approach consists of the following incremental steps. First, it models any business activity behaviour governing any service-oriented business process as Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules. Then such informal rules are made more interaction-centric, using adapted architectural connectors. Third, still at the conceptual-level, with the aim of adapting such ECA-driven connectors, this approach borrows aspect-oriented ideas and mechanisms, and proposes to intercept events, select the properties required for interacting entities, explicitly and separately execute such ECA-driven behavioural interactions and finally dynamically weave the results into the entities involved. To ensure compliance and to preserve the implementation of this architectural conceptualisation, the work adopts the Maude language as an executable operational formalisation. For that purpose, Maude is first endowed with the notions of components and interfaces. Further, the concept of ECA-driven behavioural interactions are specified and implemented as aspects. Finally, capitalising on Maude reflection, the thesis demonstrates how to weave such interaction executions into associated services

Service-Oriented Middleware for the Future Internet: State of the Art and Research Directions

International audienceService-oriented computing is now acknowledged as a central paradigm for Internet computing, supported by tremendous research and technology development over the last ten years. However, the evolution of the Internet, and in particular, the latest Future Internet vision, challenges the paradigm. Indeed, service-oriented computing has to face the ultra large scale and heterogeneity of the Future Internet, which are orders of magnitude higher than those of today's service-oriented systems. This article aims at contributing to this objective by identifying the key research directions to be followed in light of the latest state of the art. This article more specifically focuses on research challenges for service-oriented middleware design, therefore investigating service description, discovery, access and composition in the Future Internet of services

UML-SOA-Sec and Saleem's MDS Services Composition Framework for Secure Business Process Modelling of Services Oriented Applications

In Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, a software application is a composition of services, which are scattered across enterprises and architectures. Security plays a vital role during the design, development and operation of SOA applications. However, analysis of today's software development approaches reveals that the engineering of security into the system design is often neglected. Security is incorporated in an ad-hoc manner or integrated during the applications development phase or administration phase or out sourced. SOA security is cross-domain and all of the required information is not available at downstream phases. The post-hoc, low-level integration of security has a negative impact on the resulting SOA applications. General purpose modeling languages like Unified Modeling Language (UML) are used for designing the software system; however, these languages lack the knowledge of the specific domain and "security" is one of the essential domains. A Domain Specific Language (DSL), named the "UML-SOA-Sec" is proposed to facilitate the modeling of security objectives along the business process modeling of SOA applications. Furthermore, Saleem's MDS (Model Driven Security) services composition framework is proposed for the development of a secure web service composition

Investigations into the model driven design of distribution patterns for web service compositions

Increasingly, distributed systems are being used to provide enterprise level solutions with high scalability and fault tolerance These solutins are often built using Web servces that are composed to perform useful business functions Acceptance of these composed systems is often constrained by a number of non-functional properties of the system such as availability, scalability and performance There are a number of drstribution patterns that each exhibit different non-functional charactmstics These patterns are re-occuring distribution schemes that express how a system is to be assembled and subsequently deployed. Traditional approaches to development of Web service compositions exhibit a number of Issues Firstly, Web service composition development is often ad-hoc and requires considerable low level coding effort for realisatlon Such systems often exhibit fixed architectures, making maintenance difficult and error prone Additionally, a number of the non-funchonal reqwements cannot be easily assessed by exammng low level code. In this thesis we explicitly model the compositional aspects of Web service compositions usmg UML Activity diagrams Ths approach uses a modehng and transformation framework, based on Model Dnven Software Development (MDSD), going from high level models to an executable system The framework is guided by a methodological framework whose primary artifact is a distribution pattern model, chosen from the supplied catalog. Our modelling and transfomation framework improves the development process of Web service compositions, with respect to a number of criteria, when compared to the traditional handcrafted approach Specifically, we negate the coding effort traditionally associated with Web service composition development Maintenance overheads of the solution are also slgnificantly reduced, while improved mutability 1s achieved through a flexible architecture when compared with existing tools We also improve the product output from the development process by exposing the non-functional runtime properties of Web service compositlons using distribution patterns

Conceptual modelling of adaptive web services based on high-level petri nets

Service technology geared by its SOA architecture and enabling Web services is rapidly gaining in maturity and acceptance. Consequently, most worldwide (private and corporate) cross-organizations are embracing this paradigm by publishing, requesting and composing their businesses and applications in the form of (web-)services. Nevertheless, to face harsh competitiveness such service oriented cross-organizational applications are increasingly pressed to be highly composite, adaptive, knowledge-intensive and very reliable. In contrast to that, Web service standards such as WSDL, WSBPEL, WS-CDL and many others offer just static, manual, purely process-centric and ad-hoc techniques to deploy such services. The main objective of this thesis consists therefore in leveraging the development of service-driven applications towards more reliability, dynamically and adaptable knowledge-intensiveness. This thesis puts forward an innovative framework based on distributed high-level Petri nets and event-driven business rules. More precisely, we developed a new variant of high-level Petri Nets formalism called Service-based Petri nets (CSrv-Nets), that exhibits the following potential characteristics. Firstly, the framework is supported by a stepwise methodology that starts with diagrammatical UML-class diagrams and business rules and leads to dynamically adaptive services specifications. Secondly, the framework soundly integrates behavioural event-driven business rules and stateful services both at the type and instance level and with an inherent distribution. Thirdly, the framework intrinsically permits validation through guided graphical animation. Fourthly, the framework explicitly separates between orchestrations for modelling rule-intensive single services and choreography for cooperating several services through their governing interactive business rules. Fifthly, the framework is based on a two-level conceptualization: (1) the modelling of any rule-centric service with CSrv-Nets; (2) the smooth upgrading of this service modelling with an adaptability-level that allows for dynamically shifting up and down any rule-centric behavior of the running business activities

Research Article Novel Security Conscious Evaluation Criteria for Web Service Composition

Abstract: This study aims to present a new mathematical based evaluation method for service composition with respects to security aspects. Web service composition as complex problem solver in service computing has become one of the recent challenging issues in today's web environment. It makes a new added value service through combination of available basic services to address the problem requirements. Despite the importance of service composition in service computing, security issues have not been addressed in this area. Considering the dazzling growth of number of service based transactions, making a secure composite service from candidate services with different security concerns is a demanding task. To deal with this challenge, different techniques have been employed which have direct impacts on secure service composition efficiency. Nonetheless, little work has been dedicated to deeply investigate those impacts on service composition outperformance. Therefore, the focus of this study is to evaluate the existing approaches based on their applied techniques and QoS aspects. A mathematicalbased security-aware evaluation framework is proposed wherein Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multiple criteria decision making technique, is adopted. The proposed framework is tested on state-of-the-art approaches and the statistical analysis of the results presents the efficiency and correctness of the proposed work