Laura González

Addressing QoS issues in service based systems through an adaptive ESB infrastructure

As service-based systems operate in an increasingly distributed and dynamic environment, addressing Quality of Service (QoS) issues at runtime has become an important and difficult to achieve challenge. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), one of the current preferred middleware technologies to support the development of service-based systems, provides built-in mediation capabilities (e.g. message transformation and routing) that allow addressing several QoS requirements. However, the configuration of these capabilities cannot usually be performed automatically at runtime, which restricts the rapid responsiveness of the system. This paper proposes ESB-based solutions to address QoS issues in service-based systems. More specifically, the paper focuses on dealing with response time and service saturation issues. The solutions leverage ESB mediation capabilities and they can be automatically and dynamically applied at runtime. Additionally, the solutions are based on commonly supported ESB patterns, so they are likely to be applied in most ESB products.

Towards dynamic adaptation within an ESB-based service infrastructure layer

Service-oriented systems increasingly need to be self-adaptive in order to respond to dynamic business requirements and to satisfy quality of service conditions in a highly distributed context. Achieving such self-adaptive behavior requires a comprehensive approach throughout the different service-oriented architecture (SOA) layers to avoid, for example, conflicting adaptation actions. In turn, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) provide several out-of-the-box mediation features (e.g. message transformation, routing, monitoring) that enable adaptation at the infrastructure layer. However, dynamic adaptation (i.e. adaptation at runtime), a fundamental requirement in self-adaptive systems, is still an open issue in ESB-based platforms. This paper presents an approach that leverages ESBs mediation features to provide dynamic adaptation capabilities within an ESB-based service infrastructure layer. This work, which is based on concepts and frameworks defined within the S-Cube project, intends to be a step forward in developing a comprehensive approach to support self-adaptive service-oriented systems.

An Adaptive Enterprise Service Bus Infrastructure for Service Based Systems

Service-based systems (SBS) increasingly need adaptation capabilities to agilely respond to unexpected changes (e.g. regarding quality of service). The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a recognized infrastructure to support the development of SBS, provides native mediation capabilities (e.g. message transformation) which can be used to perform adaptation actions. However, the configuration of these capabilities cannot usually be performed at runtime. To deal with this limitation, Adaptive ESB Infrastructures have been proposed which leverage their mediation capabilities to deal with adaptation requirements in SBSs in an automatic and dynamic way at runtime. This paper presents a JBossESB-based implementation of an Adaptive ESB Infrastructure and demonstrates its operation by describing their main functionalities. The paper also presents an evaluation of the implemented solution.

A service-oriented integration platform to support a joined-up e-government approach: the uruguayan experience

E-Government Platforms have become a key tool to support the development of e-government in many countries. They usually provide infrastructure and services that facilitate the interconnection between the information systems of public agencies, provide common services that generate economy of scale, and encourage the implementation of multi-agency services. In particular, the Uruguayan E-Government Platform has the general goal of enabling and promoting the development of e-government services in Uruguay. The platform, which follows a joined-up approach, consists of an Interoperability Platform and a set of Crosscutting Services. It implements a service-oriented architecture, leveraging the Web Services technology, to expose, use and combine government functionality implemented by public agencies. This paper presents the Uruguayan E-Government Platform focusing on two components of the Interoperability Platform: the Middleware Infrastructure and the Security System. It also evaluates its first years of operation which have shown that, although there are still many challenges to be addressed, the platform is a key enabler for developing a joined-up e-government approach in Uruguay.

Run-Time Verification of Behaviour-Aware Mashups in the Internet of Things

With the new vision of the Internet of Things, physical world entities are integrated into virtual world things. Then, the Internet of Things could benefit from the Web Service architecture like today’s Web does; so Future service-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled interfaces. As demonstrated in previous work, there is a need of considering the behaviour of things to develop applications in a more rigorous way. We proposed a lightweight model for representing such behaviour based on the service-oriented paradigm and extending the standard DPWS profile to specify the order with which things can receive messages. To check whether a mashup of things respects the behaviour, specified at design-time, we proposed a static verification. However, at run-time a thing may change its behaviour or receive requests from instances of different mashups. Then, it is required to check and detect dynamically possible invalid invocations provoked by changes of behaviour. Here, we extend our static verification with an approach based on mediation techniques and complex event processing to detect and inhibit invalid invocations. The solution automatically generates the required elements to perform run-time validation of invocations. It may be extended to validate other issues.

Qbox-Services: Towards a Service-Oriented Quality Platform

The data quality market is characterized by a sparse offer of tools, providing individual functionalities which have their own interest with respect to quality assessment. But interoperating among these tools remains a technical challenge because of the heterogeneity of their models and access patterns. On the other side, quality analysts require more and more integration facilities that allow them to consolidate and aggregate multiple quality measures acquired from different observations. The QBox platform, developed within the ANR Quadris project, aims at filling this gap by supplying a service-based integration infrastructure that allows interoperability among several quality tools and provides an OLAP-based quality model to support multidimensional analysis. This paper focuses on the architectural principles of this infrastructure and illustrates its use through specific examples of quality services.

Enforcing Data Protection Regulations within e-Government Master Data Management Systems

The growing adoption of information technology by governments has led to the implementation of e-Government systems which are usually supported by middleware-based integration platforms. In particular, the increasing need of information sharing across government agencies has motivated the implementation of shared Master Data Management (MDM) Systems. On the other hand, these systems have to comply with Data Protection regulations which may hinder an extensive reuse of information in a government context. This paper addresses the issues of enforcing Data Protection (DP) regulations in e-Government MDM systems. In particular, it analyzes the requirements that DP issues pose on these systems and it proposes solutions, which leverage middleware-based capabilities and traditional MDM systems, to enforce these regulations considering different MDM architecture styles.

Towards the construction of quality-aware Web Warehouses with BPMN 2.0 Business Processes

A Web Warehouse (WW) is a Data Warehouse which consolidates data from the Web. The goal of these systems is to act as an intermediary between data publication and the user, pre-processing data and adding value to them. This pre-processing involves data integration, data aggregation, data re-structuring and data quality measurement and improvement. A Business Process (BP) model helps us to specify the users, activities, precedence relations between activities and restrictions, that have to be carried out in order to obtain the desired output. In this paper we present a two level BP specification approach for constructing a WW which has two distinctive characteristics: it manages data quality and it is configurable. The first level BP model is focused on helping the user to configure the web data sources and the desired data quality characteristics, the second level BP uses the defined configuration to generate the WW. Quality characteristics are also defined for the intermediate data sources used to populate the WW.

Towards a Compliance-Aware Inter-organizational Service Integration Platform

Organizations are increasingly required to collaborate with each other in order to achieve their business goals. The service oriented paradigm is currently the preferred approach to carry out this collaboration as facilitates interconnecting the software systems of different organizations. More concretely, such integration is supported by integration platforms which are specialized middleware-based infrastructures enabling the provision, discovery and invocation of interoperable software services. On another hand, these integrated and collaborative environments e.g. e-government, e-health, e-science, e-commerce and e-business must comply with regulations originating in laws, sectorial regulations, service level agreements and standards, among others. This research aims at proposing solutions to monitor and enforce compliance requirements in inter-organizational service integration platforms. Particularly, this work addresses compliance requirements on services, information exchanged and the flow of interactions between organizations. The solutions, which are based on well-known enterprise integration patterns and other capabilities e.g. adaptability and context-awareness, are then refined into specific middleware technologies, notably Enterprise Service Bus and Complex Event Processing engines.

An ESB-Based Infrastructure for Event-Driven Context-Aware Web Services

Web services are nowadays one of the preferred technologies to implement service-oriented architectures and to communicate distributed applications. On the other hand, context-awareness is highly demanded for distributed applications. However, even though there are excellent tools and frameworks for service development, getting services to be context-aware is still under investigation. In turn, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a standards-based integration platform, which provides mediation capabilities (e.g. routing, transformation). ESBs are being increasingly used in conjunction with Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines to support event-driven architectures scenarios. In this regard, this paper proposes an ESB-based infrastructure which, leveraging its mediation capabilities and a CEP engine, allows the construction of context-aware web services. Concretely, CEP techniques are used to detect the complex situations that may affect services and mediation mechanisms are used to adapt service requests and responses to make them context-aware.