Software Engineering || Net-Centric Computing || Postdoc & Visiting Scholars

   Service-oriented design with aspect (SODA)

       Service-oriented computing (SOC) is an emerging paradigm to utilize services as core elements in software development. However, the service design of SOC oftentimes fails to capture service-specific concerns required for delivering high-quality and user-friendly services. This is because those concerns are intrinsically tangled within a service. Without regard to them, a service design result will be inadequate to reflect all facets of a service.

In order to provide an efficient and effective service design method, we develop a service-oriented design approach by integrating the concept of aspects, called Service-Oriented Design with Aspects (SODA). Recently, the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has gained growing interest and its "aspect" concept has been extensively applied to the early stages of software development as an abstraction and encapsulation mechanism with the purpose of enhancing separation of concerns. In SODA, a service system is considered as a set of primitive services and aspects. In particular, aspects are defined and used to capture service-specific or domain-specific concerns required for delivering high-quality and user-friendly services.

Using primitive services and aspects, SODA delineates a service system in two views, the structural and behavioral view, using an extended UML2 and Petri net, respectively. In particular, SODA supports an automatic weaving process to generate an integrated Petri net for a distinct service from the behavioral perspective of both a primitive service and a set of aspects related to it, and the relationships between them. With the integrated Petri net obtained through the weaving process, SODA facilitates the verification and evaluation of service design results. In addition, SODA supports an aspect-oriented extension mechanism to help comparative evaluation of the service design results, for example, in terms of performance. The objective of this research is to provide a simple and generic, but effective formal design method with a standardized description for service-oriented systems.

Such a formal method makes it possible to evolve service designs in existence or construct varying versions of a service design with a reduced development effort by replacing or reusing existing design elements, especially aspects.

International Center for Software Engineering

Iowa State Univerisity,  Department of Computer Science

226 Atanasoff Hall, Ames, IA 50011

1-515-294-4377 (Office) 1-515-294-0258(Fax) E-mail: chang@cs.iastate.edu

Copyright © 2002, Prof. Carl K. Chang