A novel programming framework for architecting next generation enterprise scale information systems

Abstract

The increasing popularity and usage of internet based services makes design of software system complex and their power unlimited in scale. These systems often involve heterogeneous environment and platforms. They continuously evolve in order to meet the changes in technology and business practices. Emergence of information system architecture based on disparate externally provided internet based services warrant incorporation of novel design primitives in the application design. Traditionally popular application design primitives includes separation, abstraction, compression, uniform composition, replication and resource sharing that has evolved and came to vogue based on past experience and expert practice. This work examines and evaluates approaches to incorporation of new and novel unit operations around which applications can be architected, designed and analyzed for the internet computing and big data era. Incidentally it is found that portions of agent technology provides several unit operations such as migration of code and speech-act based responsibility delegation/application composition as application architectural primitives. This work determines extensions to Web Services-Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) programming framework--called as ACtive Internet Application Framework (ACIAF) and is suited for incorporation of novel unit operations such as migration of code and speech-act based component orchestration/application composition to enable construction of next generation information systems. An analysis of merits and demerits of using WS-BPEL technology to realize ACIAF is also carried out here. Code mobility feature of ACIAF is demonstrated using a use case while loosely coupled application design using ACIAF is theoretically discussed. Formal analyzability of mobility behavior of ACIAF application is highlighted based on its conformance to Petri-net formalism. Further formal logical analyzability/interpolatability of individual actions performed by collaborating ACIAF applications is also highlighted. It is argued here that ACIAF shall provide necessary foundation, guidance and motivation for further detailed technical work on several ideas presented to realize next generation information systems. This work firmly establishes extension to WS-BPEL platform as a most viable approach to realize novel architectural primitives to the design and implementation of next generation information systems.