Development of service-oriented architectures using model-driven development : a mapping study

Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are two challenging research areas in software engineering. MDD is about improving software development whilst SOA is a service-based conceptual development style, therefore investigating the available proposals in the literature to use MDD when developing SOA may be insightful. However, no studies have been found with this purpose. Objective: This work aims at assessing the state of the art in MDD for SOA systems. It mainly focuses on: what are the characteristics of MDD approaches that support SOA; what types of SOA are supported; how do they handle non-functional requirements. Method: We conducted a mapping study following a rigorous protocol. We identified the representative set of venues that should be included in the study. We applied a search string over the set of selected venues. As result, 129 papers were selected and analysed (both frequency analysis and correlation analysis) with respect to the defined classification criteria derived from the research questions. Threats to validity were identified and mitigated whenever possible. Results: The analysis allows us to answer the research questions. We highlight: (1) predominance of papers from Europe and written by researchers only; (2) predominance of top-down transformation in software development activities; (3) inexistence of consolidated methods; (4) significant percentage of works without tool support; (5) SOA systems and service compositions more targeted than single services and SOA enterprise systems; (6) limited use of metamodels; (7) very limited use of NFRs; and (8) limited application in real cases. Conclusion: This mapping study does not just provide the state of the art in the topic, but also identifies several issues that deserve investigation in the future, for instance the need of methods for activities other than software development (e.g., migration) or the need of conducting more real case studies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

CHOReOS_Requirements for the CHOReOS IDRE (D5.1)

The goal of this document is to elucidate the requirements that the various actors involved with future Internet choreographies will have from the CHOReOS Integrated Development and Runtime Environment (IDRE). Since the IDRE integrates the work performed in the work packages WP 2 - 4, the aforementioned requirements lead to the specification of requirements for WP 2 - 4, specifically those requirements which will govern how they will integrate with each other. We base our work on the conceptual model of CHOReOS defined in D1.2, and first present the main concepts used while discussing the IDRE, including the actors and use cases. This is followed by an exhaustive list of requirements pertaining to each functionality that the IDRE will provide with regard to design, development and deployment of choreographies

Jolie Microservices: An Experiment

Os microsserviços estão cada vez mais presentes no mundo das tecnologias de informação, por providenciarem uma nova forma construir sistemas mais escaláveis, ágeis e flexíveis. Apesar disto, estes trazem consigo o problema da complexidade de comunicação entre microsserviços, fazendo com que o sistema seja difícil de manter e de se perceber. Linguagens de programação específicas a microsserviços como Jolie entram em cena para tentar resolver este problema e simplificar a construção de sistemas com arquiteturas de microsserviços. Este trabalho fornece uma visão ampla do estado da arte da linguagem de programação Jolie onde é primeiramente detalhado o porquê de surgirem linguagens específicas a microsserviços e como a linguagem Jolie está construída de maneira a coincidir com as arquiteturas de microsserviços através de recursos nativos. Para demonstrar todas as vantagens de usar esta linguagem em comparação com as abordagens mais mainstream é pensado um experimento de desenvolvimento de um sistema de microsserviços no âmbito de uma aplicação de e-commerce. Este sistema é construído de forma igual usando duas bases tecnológicas – Jolie e Spring Boot. O Spring Boot é considerado a tecnologia mais usada para desenvolver sistemas de microsserviços sendo o candidato ideal para comparação. É pensada toda a análise e design deste experimento. Em seguida, a implementação da solução é detalhada a partir das configurações do sistema, escolhas arquitetónicas e como elas são implementadas. Componentes como API gateway, mediadores de mensagens, bases de dados, orquestração de microsserviços, e conteinerização para cada microsserviço e outros componentes do sistema. Pol último as soluções são comparadas e analisadas com base na abordagem Goals, Questions, Metrics (GQM). São analisadas relativamente a atributos de qualidade como manutenção, escalabilidade, desempenho e testabilidade. Após esta análise pode-se concluir que a solução construída com Jolie apresenta diferenças na manutenção sendo significativamente superior à solução baseada em Spring Boot e apresenta diferenças em termos de performance sendo ligeiramente inferior à solução construída com Spring Boot. O trabalho termina com a indicação das conquistas, dificuldades, ameaças à validade, possíveis trabalhos futuros e observações finais.Microservices are increasingly present in the world of information technologies, as they provide a new way to build more scalable, agile, and flexible systems. Despite this, they bring with them the problem of communication complexity between microservices, making the system difficult to maintain and understand. Microservices-specific programming languages like Jolie come into play to try to solve this problem and simplify the construction of systems with microservices architectures. This work provides a broad view of the State of Art of the Jolie programming language, where it is first detailed why microservices-specific languages emerge and how the Jolie language is built to match microservices architectures through native resources. To demonstrate all the advantages of using this language compared to more mainstream approaches, an experiment is designed to develop a microservices system within an e-commerce application. This system is built equally using two technological foundations – Jolie and Spring Boot. Spring Boot is considered the most used technology to develop microservices systems and is an ideal candidate for comparison. The entire analysis and design of this experiment are thought through. Then the implementation of the solution is detailed from system configurations, architectural choices, and how they are implemented. Components such as API gateway, message brokers, databases, microservices orchestration, and containerization for each microservice and other components of the system. Finally, the solutions are compared and analyzed based on the Goals, Questions, Metrics (GQM) approach. They are analyzed for quality attributes such as maintainability, scalability, performance, and testability. After this analysis, it can be concluded that the solution built with Jolie presents differences in maintenance being significant superior to the solution based on Spring Boot, and it presents differences in terms of performance being slightly inferior to the solution built with Spring Boot. The work ends with an indication of the achievements, difficulties, threats to validity, possible future work, and final observations

A Perspective on the Future of Middleware-based Software Engineering

International audienceMiddleware is a software layer that stands between the networked operating system and the application and provides well known reusable solutions to frequently encountered problems like heterogeneity, interoperability, security, dependability. Further, with networks becoming increasingly pervasive, middleware appears as a major building block for the development of future software systems. Starting with the impact of pervasive networking on computing models, manifested by now common grid and ubiquitous computing, this paper surveys related challenges for the middleware and related impact on the software development. Indeed, future applications will need to cope with advanced non-functional properties such as contextawareness and mobility, for which adequate middleware support must be devised together with accompanying software development notations, methods and tools. This leads us to introduce our view on next generation middleware, considering both technological advances in the networking area but also the need for closer integration with software engineering best practices, to ultimately suggest middleware-based software processes

CHOReOS perspective on the Future Internet and initial conceptual model (D1.2)

The D1.2 deliverable outlines the CHOReOS perspective on the Future Internet and its conceptualization. In particular, the deliverable focuses on: - Definition of the Future Internet and related Future Internet of Services and (Smart) Things, as considered within CHOReOS, further stressing the many dimensions underpinning the Ultra-Large Scale of the Future Internet; - Definition of the initial conceptual model of the CHOReOS Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the Future Internet, identifying the impact of the ULS dimensions upon the traditional SOA paradigms and associated infrastructure

A formal architecture-centric and model driven approach for the engineering of science gateways

From n-Tier client/server applications, to more complex academic Grids, or even the most recent and promising industrial Clouds, the last decade has witnessed significant developments in distributed computing. In spite of this conceptual heterogeneity, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to have emerged as the common and underlying abstraction paradigm, even though different standards and technologies are applied across application domains. Suitable access to data and algorithms resident in SOAs via so-called ‘Science Gateways’ has thus become a pressing need in order to realize the benefits of distributed computing infrastructures.In an attempt to inform service-oriented systems design and developments in Grid-based biomedical research infrastructures, the applicant has consolidated work from three complementary experiences in European projects, which have developed and deployed large-scale production quality infrastructures and more recently Science Gateways to support research in breast cancer, pediatric diseases and neurodegenerative pathologies respectively. In analyzing the requirements from these biomedical applications the applicant was able to elaborate on commonly faced issues in Grid development and deployment, while proposing an adapted and extensible engineering framework. Grids implement a number of protocols, applications, standards and attempt to virtualize and harmonize accesses to them. Most Grid implementations therefore are instantiated as superposed software layers, often resulting in a low quality of services and quality of applications, thus making design and development increasingly complex, and rendering classical software engineering approaches unsuitable for Grid developments.The applicant proposes the application of a formal Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to service-oriented developments, making it possible to define Grid-based architectures and Science Gateways that satisfy quality of service requirements, execution platform and distribution criteria at design time. An novel investigation is thus presented on the applicability of the resulting grid MDE (gMDE) to specific examples and conclusions are drawn on the benefits of this approach and its possible application to other areas, in particular that of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) interoperability, Science Gateways and Cloud architectures developments

Scenario-Driven Development of Service-Oriented Systems

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software architectural style, which relies on reusable and composable services. In addition to software-orientation, SOA includes a business viewpoint, so that business requirements can be captured as high level business processes. Business processes can be implemented, for example, as an orchestration of different service components. Individual services participate in the overall execution of business processes by providing elementary service activities. In addition to flexibility and services reuse, bridging of business and information technology (IT) views is one of the claimed benefits of SOA. Development of service-based systems includes a range of different activities. However, development of service-based systems is still lacking systematic and tool vendor independent practices and development methods. In this thesis, a development process for a service provider, called Service Product Development Process (SPDP), is presented. It consists of several development phases and related activities. The input for SPDP includes high level business process requirements. The result of the process is a new service-based product to be added to the service provider’s product portfolio. The purpose of this thesis is to study the applicability and the benefits of applying a scenario-driven approach, a type of requirement-driven development, for the development of service-based systems. Scenarios are used to capture functional system requirements as simple message sequences given as UML sequence diagrams. The scenario-driven approach is applied to different phases of SPDP including business process development, service specification, and service realization. The proposed scenario-driven approach is not limited to the SPDP context. It is rather a general purpose framework for development of service-based systems or products, called SceDA. SceDA includes three independent scenario-based methods, which are targeted to support different development phases of service-based systems. One of the three methods is used for scenario-based business process development. The other two methods are targeted at service development, in particular, service specification and service realization. Service specification is supported by a method for automatically mining and re-documenting the development rules as scenarios. To support service realization, a method for generating source code for individual service and client applications has been developed. Each method includes a description of the developed tool support and a case study.Case studies are used for constructing and evaluating the three scenario-based methods developed. Each method is applied as a case study in the context of development phases of SPDP. In the first case study, scenario-driven business process development method is applied. Two other case studies concern constructing and using scenarios for application development. One case study utilizes the scenario mining method. In the other case study, the code generation method is applied