by Thomas Cottenier and Andrew Prunicki
Directed by Dr. Tzilla Elrad
This work is partially supported by CISE NSF grant No. 0137743.

CASS

This work introduces a support architecture and a methodology for the incremental development of applications that target highly dynamic service-oriented environments. The approach builds on top of collaboration-based analysis techniques applied to the development of distributed systems. The authors introduce Context Aspect Sensitive Services (CASS) as being services whose instance interfaces can dynamically be adapted by Service Refinement Layers, using aspect weaving. A service refinement layer encapsulates distributed aspects that cut across service container boundaries. It modularizes the structure and the collaborative behavior of composite services. A service-oriented support architecture exploiting dynamic AOP technology is presented. The architecture provides built-in support for remote pointcuts and a service-oriented joinpoint meta-model. Service refinement layers can be used to compose and orchestrate Web Services, and have the potential to define much more advanced collaboration scenarios than can be specified with state-of-the-art web service orchestration languages such as BPEL. Moreover, the orchestration is decentralized and it can be deployed dynamically on a per-instance basis. Furthermore, the service composition deployment specification provides a clean separation between the various roles services play.