Judah M. Diament

A Service-oriented Middleware for Runtime Web Services Interoperability

A major goal of service-oriented architectures is to enable software interoperability in heterogeneous and dynamic environments. Web services standards and protocols aim to support this goal and middleware systems implementing these standards and protocols consequently are needed. Maintenance and administration of middleware is made difficult due to variations in standards and their constant evolution. In this paper, we introduce a new service-oriented middleware architecture for runtime Web services interoperability. Different from other middleware systems our approach applies service-oriented computing principles on the middleware layer, thereby establishing an on-demand model for middleware features. Clients can use middleware as services, dynamically discovering and using the services as interoperability requirements are determined. Further, middleware as services allows middleware to be provided and managed separately from its clients. We present the policy-based programming model, architecture, and details of our middleware, and discuss new challenges that arise in this context, such as distribution of middleware services. The approach is validated through a scenario integrating Web service transaction middleware

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.

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.

Using the “Physics” of notations to analyze a visual representation of business decision modeling

Visual representations are common in communicating about artifacts such as computer programs, software architectures, and business rules. Yet, generally speaking, these representations seem much harder to learn and to use than many of the representations in other domains. Moody [1] has pointed this out and proposed a set of principles for visual representations based on a wide review of relevant literature in cognitive psychology and software engineering. The real test of this framework is to use it. In this paper, we apply the principles set forth in Moody to examine and improve a proposed representation for business rules and business decisions.

Business Users and Program Variability: Bridging the Gap

In order to make software components more flexible and reusable it is desirable to provide business users with facilities to assemble and control them, but without first being converted into programmers. We present our fully-functional prototype middleware system where variability is externalized so that core applications need not be altered for anticipated changes. Application behavior modification is fast and easy, suitable for a quickly changing e-commerce world.

Fusion: a system for business users to manage program variability

In order to make software components more flexible and reusable, it is desirable to provide business users with facilities to assemble and control them without their needing programming knowledge. This paper describes a fully functional prototype middleware system where variability is externalized so that core applications need not be altered for anticipated changes. In this system, application behavior modification is fast and easy, making this middleware suitable for frequently changing programs.