Service Composition Verification and Validation

Web services are changing software development thanks to their loosely coupled nature and simple adoption. They can be easily composed to create new more powerful services, allowing for large programming systems. Verification and validation techniques try to find defects in a program to minimize losses that its malfunction could cause. Although many different approaches have been developed for “traditional” program testing, none of them have proven definitive. The problem is even more challenging for new paradigms like web services and web service compositions, because of their dynamic nature and uncommon web service-specific instructions. This chapter surveys the different approaches to web service and web service composition verification and validation, paying special attention to automation. When no tools are available for a given technique, academic efforts are discussed, and challenges are presented.

Semi-Automated Lifecycles for Eliciting Requirements for Service-Oriented Environments

Service-based tools are beginning to mature, but there is a cognitive gap between the understanding of what currently exists within an organization and how to use that knowledge in planning an overall enterprise modernization effort that realizes a service-oriented architecture. Traditional and contemporary software engineering lifecycles use incremental approaches to extract business information from stakeholders in developing features and constraints in a future application. In traditional environments, this information is captured as requirements specifications, use cases, or storyboards. Here, we address the evolution of traditional software engineering approaches to support the conceptualization of abstract services that overlap multiple organizations. Traditional software engineering lifecycles must be enhanced with emerging processes related to the development applications for service-oriented environments. The chapter discusses state-of-the-art approaches that elicit information about the requirements for service-oriented architectures. These approaches tend to leverage existing requirements engineering approaches to suggest aggregate service-based capabilities that might be most effective for a particular environment.

Service-Oriented Computing

The visionary promise of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a world-scale network of loosely coupled services that can be assembled with little effort in agile applications that may span organizations and computing platforms. In practice, services are assembled in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that provides mechanisms and rules to specify, publish, discover and compose available services. The aim of this chapter is to present the different technologies implementing the new paradigm of SOA: Web Services, UPnP, DPWS, and service-oriented component OSGi and iPOJO. These technologies have been developed and adapted to multiple domains: application integration, pervasive computing and dynamic application integration.

Abstract Service for Cyber Physical Service Composition

The collaboration of cyber physical systems poses many real-world challenges, such as knowledge restriction, resource contention, and communication limitation. Service oriented architecture has been proven effective in solving interoperability issues in the software engineering field. The semantic web service helps to automate service discovery and integration with semantic information. This chapter models cyber physical system functionalities as services to solve the collaboration problem using semantic web services. We extend the existing OWL-S framework to address the natures of the cyber physical systems and their functionalities, which are different from software systems and their functionalities. We also present a case study to illustrate our approach.

Towards a High-Availability-Driven Service Composition Framework

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), a main trend in software engineering, promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted a great deal of attention from researchers, and has been comprehensively adopted by industry. However, service composition enabling the aggregation of existing services into composite services still imposes a great challenge to service-oriented technology. Web service composition requires component Web services to be available in request, to behave correctly in operation, and to be replaceable flexibly in failure. Although availability of Web services plays a crucial role in building robust SOC-based applications, it has been largely neglected, especially for service composition. In this chapter, we propose a service composition framework that integrates a set of composition-based service discovery mechanisms, a user-oriented service delivery approach, as well as a service management mechanism for composite services.

SOA Designed Health Care System for Taiwan Government

SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is gaining popularity in becoming the mainstream in corporate integrated applications in recent years. However, at the early stage of proposal for SOA, due to the lack of a completion in relevant standards and infrastructure, corporations still need to evaluate the effect and risks involved in investment for SOA. For this reason, the introduction for SOA among corporations becomes relatively conservative. In contrast to the conservation projected by corporations at the initial stage, the government agents took position in promoting SOA and developing e-Government, who were the forerunners first committed in the integration of SOA applications.

A Model-Driven Approach to Service Composition with Security Properties

The software engineering community is striving to handle a significant number of new critical demands. Productivity, quality, and runtime flexibility are only few of them. To satisfy such requirements, new development paradigms are regularly proposed. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is one of them. SOC is based on the notion of services, which are well-defined composition units, to support rapid application development. This chapter presents a brief state of the art of services. Although SOC brings properties of major interest, it suffers from usual limitations of reused-based approach. In particular, service composition is much more complicated than often pretended. In this chapter, we propose to present a model-driven approach to service composition dealing with non-functional aspects, including security.

A QoS-Aware Service Bus with WSLA-Based Monitor for Media Production Systems

The past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the distribution channels available to media companies. While media companies once distributed their programming through one or two mediums, such as TV broadcasts and video tapes, the same programming is now also distributed through additional mediums such as the Internet and mobile phones. In consequence, media companies are faced with increasingly complex problems associated with translating one piece of programming into multiple formats for distribution. As a result, the IT systems of these companies are now required to handle both new content formats and to ensure that content is simultaneously and successfully prepared in order to meet scheduling and distribution requirements for multiple delivery pathways. This paper describes a solution that was developed to address this problem. It consists of a media asset management system that is used to support media content production and distribution. In addition, this work implements service oriented architecture (SOA) that relies on an enhanced enterprise service bus (ESB). This enhanced ESB, referred to here as a QoS-Aware service bus (QASB), makes it possible to designate which of the available transcoding servers will perform a required task, thus providing a service selection scheme that improves the efficiency of media content production and distribution processes. This system was implemented at Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS) in January 2010 and is currently providing complete support to the company’s daily operations. Since implementation, this automated process has increase the average number of transcoding jobs completed daily from 500 to 700 – and increase of 40 percent. This increased productivity has in turn resulted in a decrease in the amount of time staff must wait for jobs to be completed to 3-5 days from a pre-QASB time of 7-10 days.

Case Study on SOA Implementation Framework and Applications

As industry shows increasingly meager profits, increasing value-added products is imperative to enhance profits. Across all industries, executives are demanding more and more value and specific characteristics from their strategic business processes. The CEOs of enterprises engage in integrating their IT organizations to measurably improve the flow of data and information driving key business decisions. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides a set of infrastructure capabilities, implemented by middleware technology, that enable the integration of services in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The ESB concept already has a number of uses that solve some very common and challenging integration problems. Innovative Digitech-Enabled Applications & Services Institute (IDEAS) of Institute for Information Industry (III) executed many projects, which support technology transfer to and assist some industries, subsidized by Economic department of Taiwan. Three relatively industrial applications with EBS are discussed.

Adaptive and Dynamic Service Compositions in the OSGi Service Platform

Service-oriented architectures provide a good level of decoupling between the elements that compose an application. Service compositions may take into account that services that take part in the composition can appear and disappear. This is typically not the case when using Web Services. In dynamic environments this uncertain service availability is a recurrent scenario. Applications should be ready to handle that and dynamically adapt their behavior based on the application’s context and the available services. Although typically presented using Web Services, there are also SOAs that use other technologies. In this chapter we provide an overview on some dynamic service oriented platforms, giving special focus on the OSGi Service Platform. Also, we present what principles and mechanisms help to handle dynamicity, and we provide information on the dynamic service-based component models targeting the OSGi platform. These models allow the realization of applications that are adaptive upon dynamic scenarios where service availability is uncertain.