Exposing models of behaviour of E-service components
Giacomo Piccinelli · 2001
As EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) emerges, the concept of service components as complex standard objects becomes inadequate. A major strength of the object model is implementation hiding. The execution logic behind a method invocation is transparent to the user, and the assumption is that the signature of the method contains all the information the user needs to know. We suggest that in the problem domain in which service components are used, this assumption is too strong. For the services (methods) offered by a service component, a more comprehensive conversational schema replaces the basic invocation-result model of interaction. The conversation triggered by a service request may involve a number of different components in a number of different roles. We refer to these conversations as the observable behaviour of a component, and we propose they should be part of the meta-data exposed by a component.In this work, we propose a process-oriented approach to behaviour modelling for software components. An example of possible implementation for our proposal is given with reference to EJB (Enterprise Java Bean) components.