7th IEEE International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS)

Today, it was finished the 7th International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS), hosted in Madrid, Spain, during February, 25-29. The conference which had about 80 attendants from university and industry had as the main keynote speakers the notorious professor Ian Sommerville and the distinguished software engineer at IBM, Alan Brown.

The conference discussed issues related to interoperability, methods to systems adaptation, customiation, testing and secutiry, besides exploring strongly Service-Oriented Computing, especially, Service-Oriented Architecture. In his talk, Alan Brown approached it with the talk "Practical Approaches to Delivering Service-Oriented Solutions: The Role of Software Architects and Architecture in an SOA World" highlighting the current state-of-the-practice, the RUP update for SOA, and some specific techniques used there. Alan experience on the topic was very exciting. As a friend said it is incredible to hear a software engineer talking about his experience, results and challengers.

In the conference, the RiSE was represented with a paper about Domain Implementation in Software Product Lines using OSGi which showed our initial experience with this technology in the field of product lines as a structured method.

By the way, an important topic which I would like to highlight is the hype on Service-Oriented Computing. Last week, I had a small meeting with some researchers and students at Virginia Tech University and this aspect was also discussed from different point of views including reuse. At RiSE this topic is also being explored with methods and systematic ways to perform it. We hope in the future post more discussions about it especially related to reuse which is starting to happen.

For the interested, the next conference will be in U.S. on February. So put it in your agenda.

What views are necessary to represent a SOA?

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a system architecture in which a collection of loosely coupled services communicate with each other using standard interfaces and message-exchanging protocols. As an emerging technology in software development, SOA presents a new paradigm, and some authors affirms that it affects the entire software development cycle including analysis, specification, design, implementation, verification, validation, maintenance and evolution [see 1, 2 and 3].

In this context, we discussed about the paper "SOA Views: A Coherent View Model of the SOA in the Enterprise", published at IEEE International Conference on Services Computing in 2006. The authors, Ibrahim and Misic, proposed a set of nine views to represent an SOA-based architecture software: Business view, Interface view, Discovery view, Transformation view, Invocation view, Component view, Data view, Infrastructure view, and Test view.

In our discussion, the first question was: Do current approaches, such as RUP 4+1 Model View and ADD method by SEI, attend the particularities within context of SOA design?

We agree with some views and we considerate interesting within SOA approach, such as Interface view and Discovery view. The first describes the service contract, and the second provides the information necessary to discover, bind, and invoke the service.

Additionally, I agree with the paper about to have several views for SOA, because they can conduct the architects to construct a solution with the particularities of SOA and to address the quality attributes of this kind of enterprise system.

Finally, I think that misses in this paper the relation among the stakeholders and the quality attributes that each view can be address. Besides, the paper does not show how each view can be represented. For architects, it is important to have models in order to help the architects to design the solution for each view. One example of this, it is using the UML sequence diagram for Discovery view, showing how the consumer can find the services in the service registry.