Service Engineering: European Research Results
Springer, Wien, New York, (2011)DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7091-0415-6
Abstract
Service-oriented Computing (SOC) is posing increasing challenges to traditional software engineering methodologies including specification, modeling, architecture, and verification, just to name a few. On the other hand, the latest advancements in software engineering are continuously leveraged in SOC research, especially in the design and implementation of service-oriented systems. The mutual impacts between SOC and software engineering have been seen in the last decade, and great research efforts have been devoted to the field. These research efforts are generally referred to as Service Engineering.In Europe, many research projects have been funded to address a large spectrum of research challenges in service engineering. However, in spite of the considerable efforts and significant contributions, few have attempted to summarize the research results systematically. To provide a coherent and consolidated view on the European community in service engineering, the European Commission has established a collaboration working group on Service Engineering, which is lead by Schahram Dustdar. This book is a joint contribution of this working group.This book aims at introducing the state of the art of service engineering based on the research results achieved in European projects. Given the broadness of research aspects in SOC and the rich selection of software engineering methods, a coherent vision of service engineering is critical to the readability of the book. To this end, a series of use cases from the telecommunication field have been carefully designed and serve as a motivating case study for all contributions, which address different aspects of these use cases in their own ways. Because of the crosscutting nature of the research challenges, classifying the contributions into several themes would only give readers an over-simplified vision of the field. Instead, we employ the S-Cube Conceptual Research Framework to identify the research domains and cross-cutting issues addressed by each contribution.Since the initiation of this book, some noticeable trends in service engineering have been observed. In contrast to the varieties of research problems, two areas in software engineering emerge to be the main sources of methodologies employed in this book: a) Model-driven Engineering and b) Adaptive Software Architectures. At design-time, Model-driven Engineering facilitates different phases of service development. At runtime, with model management systems, models are also exploited for service compliance checking. In the area of adaptive software architecture, the key features of SOC, such as loose-coupling, late-binding, service discovery, and dynamic composition, have already ensured adaptability of service-oriented systems. Services are the means to implement adaptability, as well as a result of past achievements in adaptive software architecture.By extensively summarizing the state of the art of service engineering, this book offers a view on how SOC research is in line with the latest development of software engineering. One can expect more interactions between SOC and software engineering to enrich service engineering methodologies in the future.