MSC Dissertation in Computer EngineeringDistributed objects was, until recently, the leading technology in the design and
implementation of component-based architectures, such as the ones based on
services, better known as Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Although established in the market for more than a decade, and therefore mature, these technologies have failed to overcome the porting of the SOA concept to the Web.
Web services are a recent technology that has been growing in the last few years.
Their acceptance has increased over enterprises and organizations as they seem to
overcome the Web and interoperability related problems of the Distributed Objects
technology. Web services provide interoperability between systems and that is
undoubtedly a strength of this technology since this is a crucial aspect of nowadays
business. Moreover, the widespread of services led to the recent introduction of the service composition concept, that although being a technology independent concept,is closely related to Web services and there is no tool support for other technologies.
Nonetheless, distributed objects still play an important role in the development of
distributed systems, namely due to performance issues that are important when it
comes to the internals of a platform. However, the use of service composition in
these distributed object-based platforms requires the exposure of their composing
services as Web services.
The main objective of this masters thesis is improve the state-of-the-art in the support
for the composition of services originating from distributed objects-based platforms.
Bearing in mind that these kind of platforms are composed by several services, the
idea is to present a platform as a set of Web services in order to be able to orchestrate them