Architectural Styles for Reliable and Manageable Web Services

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web services is considered as the state-of-the-art for distributed systems integration. However, despite the growing interest and the enormous potential of SOA, the uptake of this approach is still slow particularly for mission critical systems. This is partly because the focus is still on the definition and refinement of specifications rather than defining sound architecture styles and guiding principles. Building serviceoriented applications is a complex undertaking, design patterns and frameworks have an important role to play to ease the process and to provide high Quality of Service (QoS) attributes. This paper discusses various Web services based integration patterns then it reports our experiments with wsBus, a lightweight service-oriented integration framework for dependable Web services interactions using a broker pattern. The main goal that guided the framework’s deign is to maximize decoupling complemented by scalable mediation service to cope with the inherit heterogeneity of systems involved. We discuss the system architecture and features then we report our experiences in building wsBus.