DR. MOHAMED E. FAYAD Professor of Computer Engineering Computer Engineering Dept., College of Engineering San Josi State University One Washington Square, San Josi, CA 95192-0180
Ph: (408) 924-7364, Fax: (408) 924-4153 E-mail: m.fayad@sjsu.edu http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/fayad

ABSTRACT: Full Description

SOA is a rapidly emerging technology allowing the aggregation of business functions from coarse-grained components. SOAs promote flexibility by allowing multiple business processes to share the same implementation of common individual steps where the processes and implementations vary independently -- services become the digital representation of business capabilities. The emergence of SOA concepts lends urgency to answering questions such as: What is the right way to architect a business into components? Should these designs be specific to a company, or can they be shared across companies within an industry? What is the ROI for companies to move to an SOA? Will the payoff be great enough for this movement to occur rapidly, or will this take a long time to roll out? How will IT infrastructure and application vendors respond to the emergence of SOAs? Will they likewise decompose their applications? What business model for software will emerge to support SOAs?

The SOA will become the de facto of all business activities, such as business strategy modeling, continual business optimization, business standards for extended enterprise, business performance management, information integration, and security and privacy. Information technology deployed in support of business has arrived at a natural step in its march of increasing automation. In fact, the development of new business models, processes, strategies, and workforce management methods can itself be viewed as a series of services. The SOA becomes an integral part of almost any course in business development. However, dealing with SOA forms a real challenge, as developers need to deeply understand the core knowledge of each artifact of SOA so they can apply them correctly and in the right context. In this tutorial we provide a collection of patterns organized in a Pattern Language (PL) that encompasses the knowledge of both the syntax and the semantics of an SOA. The objective of the PL is to develop the core knowledge of an SOA and present it in a way that can be effectively reused in business. It will serve as a base for dealing with business activities.

The PL is developed based on the concepts of the software stability model (SSM), which is a new methodology to develop stable systems. The concept of Software Stability provides a set of guidelines for developing patterns that will be simple to learn and will provide a large feature set that can be used to quickly hook multiple applications with minimal changes. The applicability of these patterns with various applications using Java and OCL is proposed for implementation. Using SSM guidelines, we are able to distill the core knowledge of SOA artifacts and present them in a form of patterns. This tutorial will provide an effective way to communicate SOA concepts and models in both business and academia.