Ignacio Silva-Lepe

Combining Quality of Service and Social Information for Ranking Services

In service-oriented computing, multiple services often exist to perform similar functions. In these situations, it is essential to have good ways for qualitatively ranking the services. In this paper, we present a new ranking method, ServiceRank, which considers quality of service aspects (such as response time and availability) as well as social perspectives of services (such as how they invoke each other via service composition). With this new ranking method, a service which provides good quality of service and is invoked more frequently by others is more trusted by the community and will be assigned a higher rank. ServiceRank has been implemented on SOAlive, a platform for creating and managing services and situational applications. We present experimental results which show noticeable differences between the quality of service of commonly used mapping services on the Web. We also demonstrate properties of ServiceRank by simulated experiments and analyze its performance on SOAlive.

Ranking Services by Service Network Structure and Service Attributes

Service network analysis is an essential aspect of web service discovery, search, mining and recommendation. Many popular web service networks are content-rich in terms of heterogeneous types of entities, attributes and links. A main challenge for ranking services is how to incorporate multiple complex and heterogeneous factors, such as service attributes, relationships between services, relationships between services and service providers or service consumers, into the design of service ranking functions. In this paper, we model services, attributes, and the associated entities, such as providers, consumers, by a heterogeneous service network. We propose a unified neighborhood random walk distance measure, which integrates various types of links and vertex attributes by a local optimal weight assignment. Based on this unified distance measure, a reinforcement algorithm, ServiceRank, is provided to tightly integrate ranking and clustering by mutually and simultaneously enhancing each other such that the performance of both can be improved. An additional clustering matching strategy is proposed to efficiently align clusters from different types of objects. Our extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real service networks demonstrates the effectiveness of ServiceRank in terms of the quality of both clustering and ranking among multiple types of entity, link and attribute similarities in a service network.

SOAlive Service Catalog: A Simplified Approach to Describing, Discovering and Composing Situational Enterprise Services

SOAlive aims at providing a community-centric, hosted environment and, in particular, at simplifying the description and discovery of situational enterprise services via a service catalog. We argue that a service community has an impact not only on users and services, but also on the environment itself. Specifically, our position is that a service catalog adds value to users, and is itself enriched, by its incorporation into a community-centric service hosting environment. In addition, analyses of web services directories suggest that a catalog service for enterprise services can be better provided by using a simpler content model that better fits REST, taking advantage of collaborative practices to annotate catalog entries with informal semantic descriptions via tagging, providing a mechanism for embedding invocations of discovered services, and allowing syntactic descriptions to be refined via usage monitoring. The SOAlive service catalog defines a flexible content model, a discovery function that navigates the cloud of tag annotations associated with services in a Web 2.0 fashion, and a service description refinement function that allows the actual use of a service to refine the service description stored in the catalog.

The Future of Service Marketplaces in the Cloud

For as long as there have been services there has been a desire to have a convenient medium to expose and discover service offerings. Since early on, various efforts have attempted various approaches at the exchange of computational services, prompting the question of whether there is a market for Web services. We believe that a services marketplace should fulfill the promise of an electronic emporium where third party service providers are able to offer their services in a ubiquitous ecosystem, and where service consumers are able to acquire service solutions that are tailored to their requirements. This paper explores the landscape of cloud services marketplaces, where we are, what enablers are needed to realize the vision, and it presents a prospective architecture to that end.

Riding and thriving on the API hype cycle

Guidelines for the enterprise.

Enabling Community Participation for Workflows through Extensibility and Sharing

This paper describes how community participation may be enabled and fostered in a hosted BPM system. We envision an open, collaborative system, wherein users across organizational boundaries can work together to develop and share design-time and run-time artifacts; namely extension activities, workflow models and workflow instances. The system described in this paper enables this collaboration and also allows the community to provide feedback on the shared artifacts via tags, comments and ratings.

Enterprise JavaBeans and Microsoft Transaction Server: Frameworks for distributed enterprise components

Abstract Software components were introduced to fulfill the promise of code reuse that “pure” objects were unable to deliver. This chapter examines a specific type of component, namely, distributed enterprise components, that provides “business” functions across an enterprise. Distributed enterprise components require special functions such as distribution, persistence, and transactions; these functions are typically achieved by deploying the components in an object transaction monitor. Recently, distributed enterprise components and object transaction monitor technology have standardized into two competing frameworks: Suns Enterprise JavaBeans and Microsofts Microsoft Transaction Server. The first half of this chapter discusses the concept of distributed enterprise components in some detail and shows how they have evolved in response to the need for code reuse in business environments. This evolution is closely related to developments in other areas of software technology such as databases and transaction monitors. The second half of the chapter focuses specifically on the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) technologies and explains how they relate to earlier component technologies. We show that EJBs and MTS are remarkably similar and yet differ in some important ways. We illustrate this discussion through an example developed on both frameworks.

Continuous Delivery of Composite Solutions: A Case for Collaborative Software Defined PaaS Environments

To help drive top line growth of their businesses, the development and IT organizations are under increasing pressure to create and deliver applications at ever faster paces. The advent of Cloud Computing has not only lowered the cost of IT operations but also enabled the notion of continuous delivery, which promises to radically reduce frictions in DevOps processes and speed up the product delivery cycle. With increased demand on functionality and feature, we have also seen these applications becoming more sophisticated, often integrating multiple modern programming models and techniques with the traditional n-tier web application into a composite application. This paper proposes an architectural blueprint for improved continuous delivery of these complex composite applications. It treats a solution as a holistic entity comprised of application logic and software-defined environment that the logic relies on. It also proposes a collaborative approach to software-defined Platform-as-a-Service environment building. This being an ongoing research project, this paper also briefly describes prototype, work-in-progress and thoughts on future directions.

IntegratingWeb Services and Messaging

Web services and messaging, as application-to-application communication paradigms, have so far been considered separately, with independent programming models and supporting middleware. Different efforts are now introducing messaging notions such as asynchrony, greater consumer cardinality, and looser coupling between Web services. This trend will likely result in an extension of the Web services programming model. It is not clear, however, that this extension will adhere to a pre-planned approach. A coherent approach requires a thorough integration of the Web services and messaging paradigms. This paper proposes one such approach which, in addition to supporting the current style of Web services interactions, allows the incorporation of messaging-style interactions under a common programming model. These messaging-style interactions include asynchronous request-response, oneway multi-consumer interactions, and even multiple-choice point-to-point interactions, common in message queuing systems. This paper also elaborates on a model for oneway multi-consumer interactions that integrates the publish/subscribe mode of messaging into the Web services programming model. A primary motivation for our approach is to take advantage of key messaging features, while exerting as small an impact as possible on the Web services programming model

Container-managed messaging: an architecture for integrating Java components and message-oriented applications

Container-managed messaging (CMM) allows a Java component to communicate via messaging without having to manage the messaging infrastructure, similarly to how container-managed persistence (CMP) allows an EJB (Enterprise JavaBean) to have persistent data without managing access to a data store. In addition, messaging parameters (such as destinations, mode of interaction, time-outs, etc.) can be defined declaratively in a deployment descriptor. The programming model used in CMM resembles that of CORBA messaging with the exception that it is in an anonymous and declarative fashion.