Services computing: Architectures, protocols and applications

Emerging technologies in the IT world that support services computing result in the development of new applications and the possibility of new business opportunities. To succeed in today's global environment, businesses must exploit cost-effective, easy-to-use infrastructure software that satisfies their unique computing and communication needs.;With the growth of the Internet and distributed business-to-business activities, many enterprises need to connect to applications and systems in other enterprises outside their own firewall. Communication with applications in other enterprises presents new challenges. Business activities that span multiple enterprises also present challenges for the traditional transaction processing paradigm.;As enterprises continue to exploit the opportunities that the Internet provides, the Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services and the Atom/RSS syndication technologies are becoming a form of enterprise distributed computing that is increasingly important both within and between enterprises.;In this dissertation we address the challenges of integration of distributed enterprise applications at the architecture, protocol and application levels.;Our Collaborative Computing Infrastructure facilitates interactions between distributed applications using the pull-based, event-based model of distributed computing. The use of Atom allows distributed applications to collaborate, even if they run on dissimilar computing platforms and are programmed in different programming languages.;Our Database Fusion Infrastructure enables queries on a single database, rather than on multiple databases, possibly in different enterprises with different database schema and different database platforms. The Database Fusion Infrastructure provides Reliable Data Distribution, Consistent Data Replication and Database Aggregation.;Our Reservation Protocol is an extended transaction protocol that supports business activities that span multiple enterprises. The Reservation Protocol exhibits better performance and consistency characteristics than distributed transactions based on either the Two Phase Commit Protocol or the Optimistic Two Phase Commit Protocol.;As case studies for our research on Services Computing, we have investigated and applied the Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services and Atom/RSS, as well as the infrastructure software that we have developed, to multi-level supply chain management and distributed electronic healthcare applications.