Handling transactional business services.

This article discusses the handling of transactional business services, which are service compositions that orchestrate and coordinate underlying services to process a high-level business activity. The main contribution made in this article is the presentation of the pattern TBS handler, which describes how one can implement a transactional business service (TBS). This pattern functions as an overview pattern for a complete pattern language that is outlined in the text. This pattern language provides the appropriate ingredients for the implementation of a TBS. It is presented using thumbnails.

A Software Tool for Selection and Integrability on Service Oriented Applications

Connecting services to rapidly developing service-oriented applications is a challenging issue. Selection of adequate services implies to face an overwhelming assessment effort, even with a reduced set of candidate services. On previous work we have presented an approach for service selection addressing the assessment of WSDL interfaces and the expected execution behavior of candidate services. In this paper we present a plugin for the Eclipse IDE to support the approach and to assist developers’ daily tasks on exploring services integrability. Particularly for behavioral compatibility we make use of two testing frameworks: JUnit and MuClipse to achieve a compliance testing strategy.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A Case Study of Enterprise-wide Digital Innovation: Involving Non-IT Employees

Today’s incumbent organisations are under pressure to proactively leverage their resources for digital innovation. Enterprise-wide initiatives hold potential in this regard by enabling employees across departments to contribute their knowledge, skills, and creativity towards digital innovation. However, IT units often struggle to transfer the ideas of non-IT employees into marketable digital solutions. Our understanding of how organisations coordinate and integrate employees’ contributions to digital innovation is limited, yet critical to their survival and growth. Taking a resource-based approach, we identify three complementary competences –orchestration, self-orchestration, and choreography– that support enterprise-wide digital innovation. Specifically, we report how these competences helped an incumbent organisation initiate digital innovation with its non-IT employees while making efficient use of its IT resources. Our study further shows that building these competences requires the strategic use of digital artefacts and their multiple roles in the innovation process

A Case Study of Enterprise-wide Digital Innovation: Involving Non-IT Employees

Today’s incumbent organisations are under pressure to proactively leverage their resources for digital innovation. Enterprise-wide initiatives hold potential in this regard by enabling employees across departments to contribute their knowledge, skills, and creativity towards digital innovation. However, IT units often struggle to transfer the ideas of non-IT employees into marketable digital solutions. Our understanding of how organisations coordinate and integrate employees’ contributions to digital innovation is limited, yet critical to their survival and growth. Taking a resource-based approach, we identify three complementary competences –orchestration, self-orchestration, and choreography– that support enterprise-wide digital innovation. Specifically, we report how these competences helped an incumbent organisation initiate digital innovation with its non-IT employees while making efficient use of its IT resources. Our study further shows that building these competences requires the strategic use of digital artefacts and their multiple roles in the innovation process

A Software Tool for Selection and Integrability on Service Oriented Applications

Connecting services to rapidly developing service-oriented applications is a challenging issue. Selection of adequate services implies to face an overwhelming assessment effort, even with a reduced set of candidate services. On previous work we have presented an approach for service selection addressing the assessment of WSDL interfaces and the expected execution behavior of candidate services. In this paper we present a plugin for the Eclipse IDE to support the approach and to assist developers’ daily tasks on exploring services integrability. Particularly for behavioral compatibility we make use of two testing frameworks: JUnit and MuClipse to achieve a compliance testing strategy.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Web service composition: A survey of techniques and tools

Web services are a consolidated reality of the modern Web with tremendous, increasing impact on everyday computing tasks. They turned the Web into the largest, most accepted, and most vivid distributed computing platform ever. Yet, the use and integration of Web services into composite services or applications, which is a highly sensible and conceptually non-trivial task, is still not unleashing its full magnitude of power. A consolidated analysis framework that advances the fundamental understanding of Web service composition building blocks in terms of concepts, models, languages, productivity support techniques, and tools is required. This framework is necessary to enable effective exploration, understanding, assessing, comparing, and selecting service composition models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. This article establishes such a framework and reviews the state of the art in service composition from an unprecedented, holistic perspective

Dynamic service orchestration in heterogeneous internet of things environments

Internet of Things (IoT) presents a dynamic global revolution in the Internet where physical and virtual “things” will communicate and share information. As the number of devices increases, there is a need for a plug-and–interoperate approach of deploying “things” to the existing network with less or no human need for configuration. The plug-and-interoperate approach allows heterogeneous “things” to seamlessly interoperate, interact and exchange information and subsequently share services. Services are represented as functionalities that are offered by the “things”. Service orchestration provides an approach to integration and interoperability that decouples applications from each other, enhancing capabilities to centrally manage and monitor components. This work investigated requirements for semantic interoperability and exposed current challenges in IoT interoperability as a means of facilitating services orchestration in IoT. The research proposes a platform that allows heterogeneous devices to collaborate thereby enabling dynamic service orchestration. The platform provides a common framework for representing semantics allowing for a consistent information exchange format. The information is stored and presented in an ontology thereby preserving semantics and making the information comprehensible to machines allowing for automated addressing, tracking and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange. Process mining techniques were used to discover service orchestrations. Process mining techniques enabled the analysis of runtime behavior of service orchestrations and the semantic breakdown of the service request and creation in real time. This enabled the research to draw observations that led to conclusions presented in this work. The research noted that the use of semantic technologies facilitates interoperability in heterogeneous devices and can be implemented as a means to bypass challenges presented by differences in IoT “things”

An adaptive service oriented architecture: Automatically solving interoperability problems.

Organizations desire to be able to easily cooperate with other companies and still be flexible. The IT infrastructure used by these companies should facilitate these wishes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Autonomic Computing (AC) were introduced in order to realize such an infrastructure, however both have their shortcomings and do not fulfil these wishes. This dissertation addresses these shortcomings and presents an approach for incorporating (self-) adaptive behavior in (Web) services. A conceptual foundation of adaptation is provided and SOA is extended to incorporate adaptive behavior, called Adaptive Service Oriented Architecture (ASOA). To demonstrate our conceptual framework, we implement it to address a crucial aspect of distributed systems, namely interoperability. In particular, we study the situation of a service orchestrator adapting itself to evolving service providers.

Insights into Web Service Orchestration and Choreography

As the Web service domain is a fast growing and equally fast changing environment, this paper tries to provide a critical snapshot of currently available standards, particularly focusing on Web service orchestration and choreography. The trend over the last few years in the Web services area firmly points towards seamless business logic integration and inter-enterprise collaboration. In order to reach these business goals, both technological and conceptual advances are required; some already have proven their viability, others still have to be made. Among them, Web service orchestration and choreography are of crucial importance, but still lack a widely agreed on development framework comprising both technological and conceptual aspects. Besides discussing problems and solutions regarding orchestration and choreography of Web services, especially from a conceptual point of view, this paper further tries to highlight mutual dependencies existing among orchestration and choreography.</p