An Integrated Service-Oriented Development Platform for Realization of e-Business Systems

SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is becoming a leading paradigm for the development of information systems and application integration. Web services [1] and Semantic Web [2] are emerging technologies that promote service-oriented architecture and service-oriented ebusiness systems. With open and standard application interfaces and technologies, Web services implement SOA’s features to support loosely coupled applications and their integration. They are expected to transform the Web into a distributed business computation network. SOA bridges the gap between business and information technologies by providing an approach for reengineering business processes with service-oriented approaches and design enterprise information systems with business-centric approaches. A number of IT companies, such as Microsoft, Sun, BEA, HP and IBM have formed working groups to develop Web services’ standards and technologies. IBM and HP proposed “business on demand” and “adaptive enterprises”, models that are based on the service-oriented paradigm, infrastructure and a number of Web services technologies. A major obstacle in developing enterprise-level Web services and transactional applications is that the current platforms, such as those that conform to J2EE and .NET, are based on object-oriented component models. Services are developed as objects and common services derived from the object-oriented frameworks. Service-oriented architectures and protocols are implemented based on the above the object model. As a result, the service-oriented functional granularity cannot be realized to meet loosely coupled and dynamic business processes. These Web services applications have performance limitations in discovery, communication, execution, transaction and security, which restrict SOA’s development for large-scale applications. The issue lies in the absence of a serviceoriented framework that provides architecture and resources for Web services development, deployment and runtime environments. For example, XML based transportation and process is insufficient without Web services oriented communication and its related resources. A generic meta-model is central to service-oriented software engineering and framework. By comparing with UML based software engineering for object-oriented applications and AUML based software engineering for agent-oriented applications, service-oriented software engineering is critical to rapid development of Web services applications. The service-oriented software engineering should facilitate service modelling and description, enable service-oriented business planning (top-down) and application development (bottom-up), provide technologies for common semantics and meta-model for service-oriented development methodologies, and specify technologies to enable interoperability between the service-oriented tools and platforms. Leading IT enterprises are evolving from software vendors to system integration and consultation providers, in order to improve their competency. This strategic migration has created challenges for their capabilities for integration and consultation. The IT enterprises need to be aware of both technical and business requirements of their customers in order to provide services. Based on research on service meta-model, we propose and implement, in this work, a business-centric, multi-model driven and collaborative development platform for service-oriented e-Business systems. The platform has applied a service-oriented framework and model-driven architecture to support service-oriented software engineering. Intelligent Web An Integrated Service-Oriented Development Platform for Realization of e-Business Systems