Consented consumer-centric non-functional property description and composition for SOA-based applications
Hanane Becha, Daniel J. Amyot · International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology · 2015
Non-functional properties (NFPs) play an important role in the service-oriented architecture (SOA). Consumer-centric NFPs are the NFPs that should be included in a service description to help service consumers decide whether a given service suits their needs. They can hence be used to enable NFP-based service selection and composition. However, nowadays, NFPs are often simply not advertised or are described in ad-hoc proprietary ways. Three important factors impede on the proper handling of NFPs in service descriptions: 1) the neglect of consumer perspectives in SOA; 2) the lack of adequate descriptive mechanisms for a number of NFPs; 3) a good understanding of NFP composability. This paper contributes a concrete syntax for an externally consented catalogue of 17 consumer-centric NFPs, together with composition algorithms that can be effectively used for defining, selecting, and composing services for NFP-aware SOA-based application designs. A realistic use case is used to illustrate the NFP composition algorithms. The NFP catalogue is also validated through its proof-of-concept integration with a mainstream technology: Web Service Description Language (WSDL).