Section: Application Domains

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Service Oriented Architectures aim at the integration of distributed services at the level of the Enterprise or of the whole Internet, be they outsourced or not to Cloud infrastructures.

The OASIS team seeks solutions to the problems encountered here, with the underlying motivation to demonstrate the usefulness of a large-scale distributed programming approach as featured by ProActive and GCM:

• Interaction between services: the uniform usage of web services based client-server invocations, through the possible support of an Enterprise Service Bus, can provide a simple interoperability between them. GCM components can be exposed as web services [44] , and we have conducted research and development to permit a GCM component to invoke an external web service through a client interface, and thus to have GCM/SCA components be integrated in SCA-based applications relying on SCA bindings configured as web services. For more loosely coupled interactions between services (e.g. compliant to the Web Services Notification standard), we pursue efforts to support publish-subscribe interaction models. Scalability in terms of event numbers, and full interoperability through the use of semantic web notations applied to these events are some of the key challenges the community is addressing and we too.

• Services compositions on a possibly large set of machines: if service compositions can even be turned as autonomic activities, these capabilities will really make SOA ready for the Internet scale. For service compositions represented as GCM-based component assemblies, we are indeed exploring the use of control components put in the components membranes, acting as sensors or actuators, that can drive the self-deployement and self-management of composite services, according to negotiated Service Level Agreements. For service orchestrations usually expressed as BPEL like processes, and expressing the composition in time aspect of the composition of services, supports for deployment, management, and execution capable to support dynamic adaptations are also needed. Here again we believe a middleware based upon distributed and autonomous components as GCM can really help.