simpA-WS: A Simple Agent-Oriented Programming Model & Technology for Developing SOA & Web Services.
Alessandro Ricci, Enrico Denti · WOA · 2007
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is more and more recognised by the industry as the reference blueprint for building inter-operable, distributed enterprise applications based on open standards such as Web Services (WS). In the current state-of-the-art, the programming models for engineering SOA systems proposed by the leading industries are essentially component-based – typically, rooted in object-oriented abstractions and technologies. On the side, such a choice benefits from the well-know advantages of component-based software engineering and from the maturity of the available technologies; on the other, however, the abstraction level provided is inadequate to model some fundamental SOA aspects – such as autonomy, control-uncoupling, data-driven interaction, activities – as firstclass concepts. Such features can be modelled quite naturally by adopting an agent-oriented perspective. In this paper we describe simpA-WS, a Java-based framework for developing SOA/WS applications which adopts an agentoriented programming model based on the general-purpose Agents and Artifacts meta-model (AA we then show how agents and artifacts can be programmed in simpA and how SOA/WS applications can be programmed in simpA-WS; a simple running example is discussed for concreteness.