Refactoring Service Interface to Support Artefact-centric Service interaction

The growth of APIs and Web services on the Internet, especially through larger enterprise systems increasingly being leveraged for Cloud and software-as-a-service opportunities, poses challenges for improving the efficiency of integration with these services. Interfaces of enterprise systems are typically larger, more complex and overloaded, with single operations having multiple data entities and parameter sets, supporting varying requests, and reflecting versioning across different system releases, compared to fine-grained operations of contemporary interfaces. We propose a technique to support the refactoring of service interfaces by deriving business entities and their relationships. In this paper, we focus on the behavioural aspects of service interfaces, aiming to discover the sequential dependencies of operations (otherwise known as protocol extraction) based on the entities and relationships derived. Specifically, we propose heuristics according to these relationships, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result of this, service operations can be refactored on business entity CRUD lines, with explicit behavioural protocols as part of an interface definition. This supports flexible service discovery, composition and integration. A prototypical implementation and analysis of existing Web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (Fedex), are used to validate the algorithms proposed through the paper.

Introduction to the Proceedings of the Workshop on User-Focused Service Engineering, Consumption and Aggregation (USECA) 2011

The first User-Focused Service Engineering, Consumption and Aggregation workshop (USECA) in 2011 was held in conjunction with the WISE 2011 conference in Sydney, Australia. Web services and related technology are a widely accepted standard architectural paradigm for application development. The idea of reusing existing software components to build new applications has been well documented and supported for the world of enterprise computing and professional developers. However, this powerful idea has not been transferred to end-users who have limited or no computing knowledge. The current methodologies, models, languages and tools developed for Web service composition are suited to IT professionals and people with years of training in computing technologies. It is still hard to imagine any of these technologies being used by business professionals, as opposed to computing professionals. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Deriving artefact-centric interfaces for overloaded web services

We present a novel framework and algorithms for the analysis of Web service interfaces to improve the efficiency of application integration in wide-spanning business networks. Our approach addresses the notorious issue of large and overloaded operational signatures, which are becoming increasingly prevalent on the Internet and being opened up for third-party service aggregation. Extending upon existing techniques used to refactor service interfaces based on derived artefacts of applications, namely business entities, we propose heuristics for deriving relations between business entities, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result, service operations are refactored on business entity CRUD which then leads to behavioural protocols generated, thus supportive of fine-grained and flexible service discovery, composition and interaction. A prototypical implementation and analysis of web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (Fedex), are used to validate the algorithms and open up further insights into service interface synthesis.

Discovering behavioural interfaces for overloaded web services

The growth of APIs and Web services on the Internet, especially through larger enterprise systems increasingly being leveraged for Cloud and software-as-a-service opportuni- ties, poses challenges to improving the efficiency of integration with these services. Interfaces of enterprise systems are typically larger, more complex and overloaded, with single operation having multiple data entities and parameter sets, supporting varying requests, and reflecting versioning across different system releases, compared to fine-grained operations of contemporary interfaces. We propose a technique to support the refactoring of service interfaces by deriving business entities and their relationships. In this paper, we focus on the behavioural aspects of service interfaces, aiming to discover the sequential dependencies of operations (otherwise known as protocol extraction) based on the entities and relationships derived. Specifically, we propose heuristics according to these relationships, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result of this, service operations can be refactored on business entity CRUD lines, with explicit behavioural protocols as part of an interface definition. This supports flexible service discovery, composition and integration. A prototypical implementation and analysis of existing Web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (Fedex), are used to validate the algorithms proposed through the paper.

A collaborative multi-agent based conference planner application using web and grid services

Distributed Collaborative Computing services have taken over centralized computing platforms allowing the development of distributed collaborative user applications. These applications enable people and computers to work together more productively. Multi-Agent System (MAS) has emerged as a distributed collaborative environment which allows a number of agents to cooperate and interact with each other in a complex environment. We want to place our agents in problems whose solutions require the collation and fusion of information, knowledge or data from distributed and autonomous information sources. In this paper we present the design and implementation of an agent based conference planner application that uses collaborative effort of agents which function continuously and autonomously in a particular environment. The application also enables the collaborative use of services deployed geographically wide in different technologies i.e. Software Agents, Grid computing and Web service. The premise of the application is that it allows autonomous agents interacting with web and grid services to plan a conference as a proxy to their owners (humans). © 2005 IEEE.

A combinatorial procurement auction for QoS-aware web services

Business processes and application functionality are becoming available as internal web services inside enterprise boundaries as well as becoming available as commercial web services from enterprise solution vendors and web services marketplaces. Typically there are multiple web service providers offering services capable of fulfilling a particular functionality, although with different Quality of Service (QoS). Dynamic creation of business processes requires composing an appropriate set of web services that best suit the current need. This paper presents a novel combinatorial auction approach to QoS aware dynamic web services composition. Such an approach would enable not only stand-alone web services but also composite web services to be a part of a business process. The combinatorial auction leads to an integer programming formulation for the web services composition problem. An important feature of the model is the incorporation of service level agreements. We describe a software tool QWESC for QoS-aware web services composition based on the proposed approach.

PRUNE and PROBE-two modular web services for protein-protein docking

The protein-protein docking programs typically perform four major tasks: (i) generation of docking poses, (ii) selecting a subset of poses, (iii) their structural refinement and (iv) scoring, ranking for the final assessment of the true quaternary structure. Although the tasks can be integrated or performed in a serial order, they are by nature modular, allowing an opportunity to substitute one algorithm with another. We have implemented two modular web services, (i) PRUNE: to select a subset of docking poses generated during sampling search (http://pallab.serc.iisc.ernet.in/prune) and (ii) PROBE: to refine, score and rank them (http://pallab.serc.iisc.ernet.in/probe). The former uses a new interface area based edge-scoring function to eliminate > 95% of the poses generated during docking search. In contrast to other multi-parameter-based screening functions, this single parameter based elimination reduces the computational time significantly, in addition to increasing the chances of selecting native-like models in the top rank list. The PROBE server performs ranking of pruned poses, after structure refinement and scoring using a regression model for geometric compatibility, and normalized interaction energy. While web-service similar to PROBE is infrequent, no web-service akin to PRUNE has been described before. Both the servers are publicly accessible and free for use.

An intelligent procurement marketplace for web services composition

This paper presents an intelligent procurement marketplace for finding the best mix of web services to dynamically compose the business process desired by a web service requester. We develop a combinatorial auction approach that leads to an integer programming formulation for the web services composition problem. The model takes into account the Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) for differentiating among multiple service providers who are capable of fulfilling a functionality. An important feature of the model is interface aware composition.

Automatically exposing OpenLifeData via SADI semantic Web Services

Background: Two distinct trends are emerging with respect to how data is shared, collected, and analyzed within the bioinformatics community. First, Linked Data, exposed as SPARQL endpoints, promises to make data easier to collect and integrate by moving towards the harmonization of data syntax, descriptive vocabularies, and identifiers, as well as providing a standardized mechanism for data access. Second, Web Services, often linked together into workflows, normalize data access and create transparent, reproducible scientific methodologies that can, in principle, be re-used and customized to suit new scientific questions. Constructing queries that traverse semantically-rich Linked Data requires substantial expertise, yet traditional RESTful or SOAP Web Services cannot adequately describe the content of a SPARQL endpoint. We propose that content-driven Semantic Web Services can enable facile discovery of Linked Data, independent of their location. Results: We use a well-curated Linked Dataset - OpenLifeData - and utilize its descriptive metadata to automatically configure a series of more than 22,000 Semantic Web Services that expose all of its content via the SADI set of design principles. The OpenLifeData SADI services are discoverable via queries to the SHARE registry and easy to integrate into new or existing bioinformatics workflows and analytical pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of this system through comparison of Web Service-mediated data access with traditional SPARQL, and note that this approach not only simplifies data retrieval, but simultaneously provides protection against resource-intensive queries. Conclusions: We show, through a variety of different clients and examples of varying complexity, that data from the myriad OpenLifeData can be recovered without any need for prior-knowledge of the content or structure of the SPARQL endpoints. We also demonstrate that, via clients such as SHARE, the complexity of federated SPARQL queries is dramatically reduced.

RESTful Discovery and Eventing for Service Provisioning in Assisted Living Environments

Service provisioning in assisted living environments faces distinct challenges due to the heterogeneity of networks, access technology, and sensing/actuation devices in such an environment. Existing solutions, such as SOAP-based web services, can interconnect heterogeneous devices and services, and can be published, discovered and invoked dynamically. However, it is considered heavier than what is required in the smart environment-like context and hence suffers from performance degradation. Alternatively, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) has gained much attention from the community and is considered as a lighter and cleaner technology compared to the SOAP-based web services. Since it is simple to publish and use a RESTful web service, more and more service providers are moving toward REST-based solutions, which promote a resource-centric conceptualization as opposed to a service-centric conceptualization. Despite such benefits of REST, the dynamic discovery and eventing of RESTful services are yet considered a major hurdle to utilization of the full potential of REST-based approaches. In this paper, we address this issue, by providing a RESTful discovery and eventing specification and demonstrate it in an assisted living healthcare scenario. We envisage that through this approach, the service provisioning in ambient assisted living or other smart environment settings will be more efficient, timely, and less resource-intensive.

一种基于移动Agent的复合Web服务容错模型

现有的Web服务容错侧重于通过扩展Web服务标准来提供容错能力.由于Web服务标准体系本身不断发展变化,并且标准之间的兼容性问题依然存在,使得这些研究成果的可实施性较弱.文章提出一种基于移动Agent的复合Web服务容错模型--MAFTM模型,从系统层次而非标准层次来解决复合Web服务的容错问题.首先说明基于移动Agent的工作流与复合Web服务的关系.在此基础上,给出MAFTM模型,包括故障类型、复制机制、"exactly once"语义和一致性算法,并证明MAFTM模型的正确性.

事务监控器的Web服务支持

事务监控器是开发、部署、监控和管理分布式事务性应用的基础平台.随着Internet和企业应用集成的发展,许多应用要求能通过广域网访问部署于事务监控器上的服务,同时能与其它分布式系统互操作,但传统的事务监控器作为一种封闭的结构,对此支持不足.Web服务是一种新的分布式组件标准,可方便地部署于广域网上并灵活地进行企业应用集成,本文提出了事务监控器支持Web服务的一个可移植的设计框架TP-WS,可以在符合X/Open DTP模型的事务监控器中支持Web服务.本文设计现已应用到事务监控器ISTX2.0中.

Web应用服务器研究综述

Web应用服务器是Web计算环境下产生的新型中间件，为创建、部署、运行、集成和管理事务性Web应用提供一个跨平台的运行环境，被认为是自关系型数据库以来最令人激动的企业应用技术。诸多IT企业纷纷推出其各自的Web应用服务器产品和系统，学术界也对这种热门领域产生了浓厚的兴趣。在分析Web计算环境下传统中间件发展所遇到的问题的基础上，介绍Web应用服务器的起源和发展、运行模式以及评测基准，然后对Web应用服务器研究现状进行综述，主要包括Web应用服务器的定义、体系结构、组件容器、分布事务处理、负载平衡、高速缓存、Web Service等研究热点和关键技术。根据评测基准，对若干主流Web应用服务器从功能和性能两个文献进行分析和比较。此外，还指出了Web应用服务器目前存在的不足以及未来的发展趋势。

一种应用敏感的Web服务请求调度策略

在当前企业级Web服务应用中，性能问题一直是人们关注的重点．然而作为支撑Web服务应用的主流平台，Web应用服务器对请求的调度仍然是传统的先来先服务策略（FCFS）．这种策略无法区分请求的重要性，降低了关键请求的性能．以往的研究较少从应用的性能需求出发考虑服务器的请求调度机制，影响了服务器性能保障的效果．对此，提出了应用敏感的Web服务请求调度策略（AWSRS），使用应用获益来评估服务器为应用提供的性能保障效果．服务器将请求按照应用的需求进行分类，并按照应用获益最大化的目标为不同类型的请求分配资源．实验表明AWSRS策略能够有效提高关键请求的性能．