Section: Application Domains

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Distributed Service Composition, Distributed Service Infrastructure, Peer-to-Peer data storage and lookup, Autonomic Management, Large-Scale deployment and monitoring

Service Oriented Architectures aim at the integration of distributed services and more generally at the integration of distributed and heterogeneous data, at the level of the Enterprise or of the whole Internet.

The team seeks solutions to the problems encountered here, with the underlying motivation to demonstrate the usefulness of a large-scale distributed programming approach and runtime support 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 [61] , and we have conducted research and development to permit a GCM component to invoke an external web service through a client interface. We also have provided a Service Component Architecture (see SCA specifications at http://www.oasis-opencsa.org/sca ) personality for GCM components (GCM/SCA) so they can 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 number of notified events per time unit, 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. Events also correspond to data that may be worth to store, for future analytics, besides being propagated to interested parties (in the form of the event content). Our research can thus also contribute to the Big Data domain, a currently hot topic in ICT.

• 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 Open Internet scale (because at such a scale, a global management of all services is not possible). 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-deployment 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.