Frans Westerhuis

Multi-level Component Oriented Methodology for Service Creation

This paper presents the COSEC methodology, a component oriented methodology for service creation. Important are the different abstraction levels, targeting a wide range of users, going from software engineers to high-end users. On a low level we create reusable developer components that groups consistent fragments of UML, SDL and Java. These developer components are composed and augmented with user-interface aspects, documentation and customization parameters to form a customer component. On a higher level, these customer components are customized and composed within a customer framework, yielding in an executable service. This combination forms an answer to the challenge of organizational and technological problems in the creation of telecom services.

Visual composition with SDL Beans

In this paper we present a technique that allows combining the best out of three worlds: component orientation formal specification in SDL and Visual Bean composition. SDL components are specified with Bean-like conventions. From the SDL Bean specifications, skeleton Java Beans are generated and visually composed in an existing Visual Bean environment. From this composition, a SDL system is generated that wires the SDL Beans and that can be executed or simulated.

XML and CORBA, Synergistic or Competitive?

The extensible Markup Language (XML) is gaining a lot of attention in the Internet world and is adopted by major companies (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle). XML, the open-standards child of SGML, promises to provide platform- and language neutral data encapsulation and separates application logic from application data. Meanwhile, various object-oriented technologies and standards such as Java and CORBA have also progressed rapidly in the past few years. Java is being presented as the perfect partner for XML. Java supports the development of Web-aware, platform-neutral applications, and XML is a platform-neutral document description meta-language. But doesn’t CORBA promise exactly the same? This paper describes the XML and CORBA ‘approaches’, and the synergies and/or competition between these technologies, taking into account the “philosophy” of each approach. Different criteria are identified where comparison is possible and relevant, such as: specification (e.g. expressive power), deployment (parsing, marshalling, scalability), and tools. XML is the next step in Web-protocols (after IP, HTML). It is concluded that XML can in conjunction with a multitude of other protocols provide the same functionality as CORBA, but will only replace CORBA in those cases where using CORBA is undesirable.