Odysseus

The Web provides in addition to the well-knownWorld-WideWeb for end users to publish and advertise and to search and discovery also a platform for software development and deployment in form of services. The Web services platform is an infrastructure of central importance for modern enterprise software systems. It allows to offer service on a global scale and enables the integration of various forms of heterogeneous local software.

The development of Web services follows some platform-specific rules. Services are software applications that are provided at particular locations. These services can be invoked as is or composed to service processes to implement more complex tasks. For any user - caller or composer - services are blackbox entities that are used based on abstract interface and behaviour descriptions published by the provider. Modelling the properties of a service is therefore of utmost importance for the communication between provider and user. Services are part of an overall business model in terms of business processes and objects, within which the actual service functionality needs to be embedded. The services processes resulting from these behaviour models and a publishable abstraction that can be made available to a potential user are the deployment aspects that need to be addressed.

The aim of this Summer project is to develop a software engineering environment for the step-wise implementation of Web services based on business modelling, software architecture, and deployment stages. Initially, language subsets shall be identified to reduce the complexity of the overall notational framework. Based on transformation rules that link the individual stages, a proof-of-concept Web service-engineering tool shall be developed. Modelling notations such as BPMN (an OMG-supported business modelling notation) and UML (the standardised and widely used software modelling notation) shall be integrated within a Web-typical framework, i.e. as an XML-based representation, customised to automatically produce platform-specific WS-BPEL code for the execution of business processes based onWeb services and WSDL specifications that describe the interface ofWeb services. An integration with Eclipse, an open source development environment, can be investigated.

In year 2, the overall layered tool framework can be extended by integrating semantic modelling aspects and by broadening the scope of the notational features.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

Web Software Engineering is a current focal area, where different aspects such as architectures and topologies, data integration, and semantic modelling are investigated within the group. This proposed project addresses model integration and support to environments that would ideally complement current activities. As a project it is a proof-of-concept exercise that demonstrate the feasibility of the idea, but it also creates an infrastructure framework that can be built on and extended in the future to develop an integrated Web service engineering environment.

Supervisors:

Dr. Claus Pahl (Computing, DCU)

Keywords:

Web services, model-driven development, service modelling, service-oriented architecture.