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

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Unlocking service composition: service composition knowledge reuse and spreadsheet-based data-flow techniques

Web service composition is a vibrant area of research. New service composition practices emerge continuously, and many Web service composition practices that came into being in the past are constantly changing and adapting to the environment. The drivers of this constant evolution are both intrinsic (e.g., the advent of new Web services such as cloud services, digital services) and extrinsic (e.g., cost saving). These factors propel the development of the field in order to meet the needs of today's world. A particular set of factors raise the need for simplification in service composition. Two of the most noteworthy are the evolution of end-users from simple consumers of software applications to users with sophisticated IT skills who are able to create applications, and the exponential growth and high-frequency release of APIs which require rapid integration into existing computing environments. Nevertheless, Web service composition, which involves the integration of autonomous and heterogeneous software systems (i.e., Web Services) to obtain a new software system, is still a difficult, tedious, and error-prone task. The question that this dissertation seeks to address is: “Can service composition be liberated?” In this thesis we propose novel models and techniques that aim to make the service composition task more intuitive and natural for the user. The proposed approaches are in the areas of service composition representation and specification. We first propose a common framework to incorporate knowledge from different existing Web service composition representations in order to facilitate global sharing and knowledge reuse. The framework consists of a Linked Data model, a set of semiautomatic extracting methods to populate the knowledge base, and a graph query system that enhances the service composition knowledge discovery. Thereupon, we introduce a Web service composition data-flow language based on spreadsheets. The purpose of this language is to relieve end-user programmers of the burden of specifying data flows in complex languages only accessible to professional developers. In addition to the spreadsheet-based language, we propose supporting techniques to create an environment that empowers users with the ability to specify data-flow expressions seamlessly

State of the art and research challenges in the area of autonomous control for a reliable internet of services

The explosive growth of the Internet has fundamentally changed the global society. The emergence of concepts like service-oriented architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS) and Cloud Computing in general has catalyzed the migration from the information-oriented Internet into an Internet of Services (IoS). This has opened up virtually unbounded possibilities for the creation of new and innovative services that facilitate business processes and improve the quality of life. However, this also calls for new approaches to ensuring quality and reliability of these services. The goal of this book chapter is to first analyze the state-of-the-art in the area of autonomous control for a reliable IoS and then to identify the main research challenges within it. A general background and high-level description of the current state of knowledge is presented. Then, for each of the three subareas, namely the autonomous management and real-time control, methods and tools for monitoring and service prediction, and smart pricing and competition in multi-domain systems, a brief general introduction and background are presented, and a list of key research challenges is formulated