A middleware for service oriented computing in dynamic environments

• Author(s): Manmohanlal, Danilo
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/5398
• Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
• Subject(s): SOA; Service composition; Abstractions; Services; Internet of things
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Paulino, Herve
• Contributor(s): RUN

Description

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

The last years have witnessed a convergence on the SOA paradigm from industrial processes enterprises (like logistics or manufacturing), using standards for data and communication. SOA promotes reusability, interoperability and loose-coupling of applications. The convergence towards SOA shows that we are leading to an infrastructure composed by several heterogeneous devices, the "Internet of Things". In this infrastructure everything can be abstracted as a service, such as household appliances, mobile devices, or industrial machinery. It is expected that this trend will continue, and as these devices interoperate in service composition, new functionalities may be discovered. Existing approaches for service composition, namely in business processes, are too bound to BPEL. Several alternatives and extensions of BPEL have been developed, but they feel more like patches than solutions. In this context SeDeUse [29] model has been proposed as an exercise to define new language constructs promoting a separation from service awareness and use. The model also relies on a middleware layer to support the execution of the application in dynamic environments. The goal of this dissertation is to instantiate the SeDeUse model in a widely used programming language in order to provide a framework for its assessment and for its future development. The work consists on implementing a concrete syntax for the model, a compilation process, and a middleware layer. The syntax contains the new language constructs that are integrated in the hosting language. The compilation process is responsible for service definition and code generation. Finally, the middleware acts as a support for the application (generated code) requests. We have seamlessly integrated SeDeUse in the Java programming language and developed a functional prototype. To assess the prototype capability, three scenarios were developed in which we demonstrated that our implementation provides a new, and simpler, approach for abstracting resources as services.