A modelling approach to service-oriented architecture

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid development of web-based technologies, considerable progress has been witnessed in service-oriented enterprise information systems. Currently a critical issue is to specify service-oriented systems for application design. This paper highlights the description problem of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and puts forward a modelling approach as solution. Different from the current SOA specification methods, we do not exclude the traditional software architecture description techniques and present an architecture description language named SO-ADL. Based on the analysis of the requirements for SOA modelling, some similar concepts are introduced as first-class modelling constructs including that of service component and connector, and some composite notions are defined for the architectural re-use as well. Furthermore, a role-driven dynamic mechanism is specified to support dynamic structure description in SOA since it is typical of the highly dynamic nature. Within the context of a travel reservation system application scenario, we demonstrate the usage and practicability of our approach based on web services.

Keywords:

• architecture description language
• modelling
• service-oriented architecture
• web services
• enterprise information systems

Acknowledgements

This research project is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60473066 and the Young Outstanding Talent Foundation of Hubei Province, China under Grant No. 2003ABB004.

We appreciate the help from colleagues, including Huiming Xiong, Zaoqing Liang, Xiangyang Jia, Peng Ye and Honghua Cao.