Service Oriented Architecture Concepts Research Articles

Business Intelligence and Service-oriented Architecture: A Delphi Study

Although service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming increasingly popular in enterprise application architectures, little is known about how SOA could support and influence the use and implementation of business intelligence (BI). We applied the Delphi method in order to identify opportunities and limitations of SOA concepts and technologies when applied to BI applications. This paper draws recommendations for BI vendors and for organizations that use or intend to use SOA to support BI.

What's in a Name? Distinguishing between SaaS and SOA

Considerable confusion arises in distinguishing between software as a service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Zachman's framework can help to try to make sense of the alphabet soup of Web services and utilities that form the basis for both SOA and SaaS. The difference between SaaS and SOA is that the former is a software-delivery model whereas the latter is a software-construction model. A better way to illuminate the differences between these two concepts is to use the well-known Zachman architectural model. In this article, we briefly examine the concepts of SaaS and SOA, followed by a brief history of software architectural models. We use the Zachman model to differentiate the two architectural approaches to building software. Because the Zachman model is so intuitive, the approach we take to describe the differences between SaaS and SOA works well even with non-IT professionals.

A LOOSELY COUPLED ASPECT LANGUAGE FOR SOA APPLICATIONS

The aspect-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm offers software developers with powerful modularization abstractions to help them explicitly separate design concerns at the source code level. However, the impact of AOP in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm has been dwarfed by the fact that existing AOP solutions are tightly coupled to a particular programming language, middleware system or execution platform. Clearly, this not only restricts the implementation choices available to application developers, but it also clashes with the heterogeneous and loosely coupled nature of SOA. This paper presents the Web Service Aspect Language (WSAL) that seamlessly integrates AOP and SOA concepts, thus avoiding the drawbacks of existing solutions. In WSAL, aspects themselves are freely specified, implemented and executed as loosely coupled web services. This characteristic allows WSAL aspects to be easily woven into the message flow exchanged between service consumers and service providers, in a way that is completely independent from any particular implementation technology. This paper also reports on the implementation and preliminary evaluation of a prototype aspect weaver for WSAL, which is based on an existing web intermediary technology.

A reference business process for ecological niche modelling

Ecological niche modelling combines species occurrence points with environmental raster layers in order to obtain models for describing the probabilistic distribution of species. The process to generate an ecological niche model is complex. It requires dealing with a large amount of data, use of different software packages for data conversion, for model generation and for different types of processing and analyses, among other functionalities. A software platform that integrates all requirements under a single and seamless interface would be very helpful for users. Furthermore, since biodiversity modelling is constantly evolving, new requirements are constantly being added in terms of functions, algorithms and data formats. This evolution must be accompanied by any software intended to be used in this area. In this scenario, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an appropriate choice for designing such systems. According to SOA best practices and methodologies, the design of a reference business process must be performed prior to the architecture definition. The purpose is to understand the complexities of the process (business process in this context refers to the ecological niche modelling problem) and to design an architecture able to offer a comprehensive solution, called a reference architecture, that can be further detailed when implementing specific systems. This paper presents a reference business process for ecological niche modelling, as part of a major work focused on the definition of a reference architecture based on SOA concepts that will be used to evolve the openModeller software package for species modelling. The basic steps that are performed while developing a model are described, highlighting important aspects, based on the knowledge of modelling experts. In order to illustrate the steps defined for the process, an experiment was developed, modelling the distribution of Ouratea spectabilis (Mart.) Engl. (Ochnaceae) using openModeller. As a consequence of the knowledge gained with this work, many desirable improvements on the modelling software packages have been identified and are presented. Also, a discussion on the potential for large-scale experimentation in ecological niche modelling is provided, highlighting opportunities for research. The results obtained are very important for those involved in the development of modelling tools and systems, for requirement analysis and to provide insight on new features and trends for this category of systems. They can also be very helpful for beginners in modelling research, who can use the process and the experiment example as a guide to this complex activity.

Constructing Home Network Systems and Integrated Services Using Legacy Home Appliances and Web Services

This article presents a framework that adapts the conventional home electric appliances with the infrared remote controls (legacy appliances) to the emerging home network system (HNS). The proposed method extensively uses the concept of service-oriented architecture to improve programmatic interoperability among multi-vendor appliances. We first prepare APIs that assist a PC to send infrared signals to the appliances. We then aggregate the APIs within self-contained service components, so that each of the components achieves a logical feature independent of device/vendor-specific operations. The service components are finally exhibited to the HNS as Web services. As a result, the legacy appliances can be used as distributed components with open interfaces. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we implement an actual HNS and integrated services with multi-vendor legacy appliances.

SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE AND INFORMATION PORTAL AS SOLUTIONS FOR ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION APPLICATIONS

Integration is addressed to management and organizational issues, related to departmental and enterprise efficiency, and is defined as the state of collaboration that exists among departments that are required to achieve unity of efforts through the company by using the best technologies and solutions. Most of the solutions for aligning technology and business requirements have been mainly technology-oriented and application focused. Recently, enterprise application integration (EAI) appeared as the solution to the business and information and communication technology (ICT) alignment problem, without offering expected business flexibility. The concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) offers a framework for better integrated systems that meet business needs, and more business flexibility than EAI. The best way to do this is to create a comprehensive, dynamic gateway for the content and services of the company, that is more than a web site, so-called portal or enterprise information portal (EIP), that provide an easy way to offer products and services for customers and partners. The paper presents the concepts of SOA, EIP, and EAI, as solutions for the management of modern enterprises.

Service oriented architectures: approaches, technologies and research issues

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) is an emerging approach that addresses the requirements of loosely coupled, standards-based, and protocol- independent distributed computing. Typically business operations running in an SOA comprise a number of invocations of these different components, often in an event-driven or asynchronous fashion that reflects the underlying business process needs. To build an SOA a highly distributable communications and integration backbone is required. This functionality is provided by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that is an integration platform that utilizes Web services standards to support a wide variety of communications patterns over multiple transport protocols and deliver value-added capabilities for SOA applications. This paper reviews technologies and approaches that unify the principles and concepts of SOA with those of event-based programing. The paper also focuses on the ESB and describes a range of functions that are designed to offer a manageable, standards-based SOA backbone that extends middleware functionality throughout by connecting heterogeneous components and systems and offers integration services. Finally, the paper proposes an approach to extend the conventional SOA to cater for essential ESB requirements that include capabilities such as service orchestration, intelligent routing, provisioning, integrity and security of message as well as service management. The layers in this extended SOA, in short xSOA, are used to classify research issues and current research activities.

A service-oriented architecture for financial business processes

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth in information and communication technologies that facilitate the design and implementation of complex inter-enterprise business processes. One of the major innovations is the concept of service-oriented architectures which considers software systems as being made up with autonomous, dynamic, loosely coupled and service-based components. This paper describes an attempt to automate financial business processes by utilizing a number of basic and composite services. As a case study, the paper describes the implementation of a realistic business process that is related to simulating a trading strategy in capital markets. An evaluation of the appropriateness of service-oriented architectures is conducted taking into account a number of factors such as flexibility, performance and development costs.

SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR FIELD CONTROL DEVICES

The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has become more and more important in the last few years in several technological fields and is beginning to play an important role also in the industrial automation field. The paper presents the application of this paradigm to field control devices of a flexible manufacturing system. In particular, here the solution adopted in the TORERO European project is described within a distributed control architecture based on intelligent devices.