Youcef Baghdadi

A business model for deploying Web services:A data-centric approach based on factual dependencies

The standards XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI allow (i) services to be accessed and executed via the Web; and (ii) a loose coupling of these services. Thanks to these standards, Web services technology is becoming not only a de facto integration standard, but also a de facto Internet standard instance of the SOA architecture. However, the deployment of such a technology is still hindered by some technical as well as methodological issues. This paper proposes a business model with multiple interfaced abstraction levels as a framework to methodologically deploy Web services technology with respect to SOA architecture. The attributes describing the business objects and coordination artifacts as described in the highest abstraction level of the business model, i.e. the universe of discourse, are aggregated according to a time/space constraint called factual dependency. Each aggregation of factually dependent attributes is validated with regard to an actual business event. The aggregation is then interfaced to lead to a well-specified Web service. The resulting comprehensive set of consistent Web services are then registered in a public or a private UDDI to be discovered and invoked by any business process. The proposed Web services generation process aims at unlocking and turning informational assets into actions. It differs from the current IT perspective approaches that generate Web services directly from redundant and inconsistent elements in the enterprise information systems.

A methodology for web services-based SOA realisation

Web services are expected to constitute an internet, standard-based realisation of service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, web services are mostly realised from an IT perspective, which yields a brittle SOA due to the lack of methodologies that consider both business strategy and requirements and IT perspectives to realise such architecture. This work proposes a methodology; we refer to as web service-based SOA realisation (WS-SOAR), to reduce the complexity of SOA implementation. The WS-SOAR development process is guided by: 1) an abstracted development architecture with mainly two independent but interfaced levels: (L1) business strategy and requirements for web services-based SOA, and (L2) newer IT platforms that realise such enterprise architecture; 2) the principles of SOA and the properties of web services that comply with SOA; 3) a set of mechanisms (e.g., models, abstraction, composition, and typology) and tools to assist the developer in each step of the process. WS-SOAR is expected to steadily and systematically realise SOA in order to enable enterprise application integration (EAI), business-2-business (B2B), and agile e-business to adapt to the business changing requirements.

Approaches to identify and develop Web services as instance of SOA architecture

Web services underlying technologies and standards allow interfacing, publishing, and binding services available on the Web and accessible through protocols based on the Internet. Moreover, Web services can easily live with distributed object computing middleware such as CORBA, DCOM and EJB, and integrated with semantic Web to overcome their limitations. These capabilities allow composition of business processes that cross the boundaries of an organization into new business solutions and ultimately e-business. Yet, Web services deployment is still hindered by technical and especially methodological issues. This paper concerns with approaches to develop Web services, namely their identification, design, deployment, and management. The paper presents a comparative study of two perspectives of developing Web services: IT-oriented and business-oriented perspectives with respect to: (1) developing process, (2) used building blocks, (3) categories of Web services, and (4) wrapping of legacy applications. This comparative study aims at integrating both perspectives into a multiple abstraction level architecture with respect to a business model, where higher abstract levels deal with business-orientation, whereas the lower levels concern with IT.

From e-commerce to social commerce: a framework to guide enabling cloud computing

Social commerce is doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, by using social media, through an enterprise interactive interface that enables social interactions. Technologies such as Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enable social commerce. Yet, a framework for social commerce, putting Enterprise Social Interactions as central entities, would provide a strong business justification for social commerce design and adoption with these enabling technologies. This work first proposes a framework for social commerce-oriented business that captures: (a) three main entities: Enterprise social Interactions, Actors, and Business Processes (and their output: products/services), (b) the relationships between these entities, and (c) the constraints (if any). Then, it focuses on the conceptualization of the key entity, Enterprise Social Interactions, to shape the required enterprise interface that promotes openness, collaboration and participation, which enables the required knowledge emergence and intelligence for the value (co-)creation. A central component of the enterprise technology architecture, we refer to as Enterprise Social Interaction Manager (ESIM) realizes the interface. An example shows how the realization of the ESIM functionalities with Web 2.0, Cloud computing, and SOA enables the different categories of collaborative B2B integration that underlines and backs social commerce.

Reverse engineering relational databases to identify and specify basic Web services with respect to service oriented computing

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as a fundamental building block. Services are self-describing, open components intended to support composition of distributed applications. Currently, Web services provide a standard-based realization of SOC due to: (1) the machine-readable format (XML) of their functional and nonfunctional specifications, and (2) their messaging protocols built on top of the Internet. However, how to methodologically identify, specify, design, deploy and manage a sound and complete set of Web services to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is still an issue. This paper describes a process for reverse engineering relational database applications architecture into SOA architecture, where SQL statements are insulated from the applications, factored, implemented, and registered as Web services to be discovered, selected, and reused in composing e-business solutions. The process is based on two types of design patterns: schema transformation pattern and CRUD operations pattern. First, the schema transformation pattern allows an identification of the services. Then the CRUD operations pattern allows a specification of the abstract part of the identified services, namely their port types. This process is implemented as a CASE tool, which assists analysts specifying services that implement common, reusable, basic business logic and data manipulation.

E-business: issues, challenges and architecture

At present, a large number of organisations are spending huge amounts of their budget on Information Technologies infrastructure. It has been found that most of these investments are not utilised efficiently and effectively. This paper reviews some of the major challenges, and management and technical issues related to an e-business architecture design and implementation. It discusses the importance of alignment of e-business strategy with e-business architecture, reasons for failures of e-businesses, success factors and risks. The paper also proposes a high-level Web Service-Oriented Architecture (WSOA) for e-business. The proposed architecture specifies a methodology to progressively deploying e-business through instantiations for each business interaction (e.g., B2B), and the requirements for its implementing technology platform. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a better methodology for Enterprise Architecture (EA). The WSOA is composed of three layers: business processes, an interactions manager and disparate information systems. This approach offers significant advantages over the traditional e-business architectures.

An Approach to Wrap Legacy Applications into Web Services

The change in business needs in terms of new solutions required organizations to move towards re-architecting their IT infrastructure. There are several means of re-architecting; one most efficient mean is to follow the service oriented architecture (SOA). SOA differs from any other architecture in the fact that it: (1) provides a methodology and an IT platform, (2) provides a loosely coupled environment, (3) exposes the applications internally and externally and (4) produces well defined, easy to use and meaningful functionalities. SOA is an architecture that considers the service as the building block of composing applications. There are several known SOA technologies such as: Java RMI, CORBA and DCOM, but the most efficient realization of SOA is Web services. However implementing SOA architecture with Web services requires IT organizations to evaluate their systems architectures and determine how they will deliver Web services. One aspect of this great issue is to deal with legacy applications which are running smoothly and performing critical tasks, but were built without taking the advent of new technologies. These applications, built at high cost over years, have knowledge locked within them and need to be adapted to SOA. This paper first investigates the approaches to wrap legacy applications to expose them as Web services with respect to SOA architecture. Then, it details the approaches and their usages in the two well-known Web service environments: J2EE and .Net. Finally, it compares the approaches with respect to some running legacy applications.

Architecture for deploying e-business: business processes, web services-business interactions manager, and information systems

The aim of e-business applications is to make businesses agile by supporting dynamic internal and external boundary-crossing business processes. This study defines a three-level architecture for developing e-business. The architecture includes (L1) business processes as front-end components; (L2) a business interactions manager (BIM) as a middle component; and (L3) disparate information systems (i.e., the information systems of enterprise, partners, suppliers, and customers) as back-end components. It specifies the requirements for the implementing technology platform to adopt it to a web services-oriented architecture (WSOA). Finally, the WSOA is used as a methodology for deploying e-business through steady instantiation for each business interactions category.

A survey on approaches to identify and develop web-enabled services with respect to service-orientation paradigm and SOA: towards a value-oriented approach

Service-Orientation (SO) is a new design paradigm to build software system solutions as compositions of reusable, distributed pieces of logic provided as services with respect to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It is an evolution of the object-orientation and component engineering that emphasises loose coupling and interoperability in addition to enforcing the principles of separation of concerns and information hiding. However, we still lack approaches to identify and develop reusable services with respect to SO and consequently, SOA. First, this work presents a roadmap towards identification, development, and deployment of web-enabled services by surveying and comparing different approaches within a framework, consisting of: (1) software building blocks at different levels of abstraction and from different perspectives, namely business and technology, and (2) the principles of SO paradigm. Then, it presents issues that need further research, which would advocate for newer approaches based on the concept of service as value described in a standard contract and provided to any business or technology solutions upon request using messaging mechanisms.

An architecture and a method for web services design: towards the realisation of service-oriented computing

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilises services as fundamental building blocks. Currently, web services provide a standard-based realisation of SOC due to: (a) the machine-readable format (XML) of their specifications and (b) their messaging protocols built on top of the internet. However, their deployment is still hindered by some technical, semantic and methodological issues. This paper concerns an architecture that guides a methodology to identify, specify, design, organise, deploy and manage a sound and complete set of web services. First, the paper highlights what existing approaches, from both IT and business perspectives, have provided to web services with respect to the following: (1) architecture, (2) design process, (3) building blocks, (4) wrapping legacy (5) usage and reuse, (6) semantics, (7) quality factors and (8) organisation and management. Then a multiple abstraction level architecture is defined, composed of high layers to deal with business orientations and low layers to deal with IT. Finally, the architecture is used as a web services design methodology with respect to SOC.