A Non-Functional Property Description Framework For Services-Oriented Applications

Recently, the Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and some related technologies such as Web Services are drawing much attention. The advantage of SOA lies in that it enables loosely-coupled integration of the services from third-party service providers. When the amount of services and services provider becomes great, especially there are many services that are similar in the functional aspects, the service selection can be a difficult issue. The facts that influence the quality of service selection include service description, user requirement description, and selection policies. The description model that only contains functional specifications of services can not satisfy the requirements of the services selection and the services discovery. We thus need to introduce non-functional property of services.The author has participated in the research and development work within the project of FLAME 2008, a services-oriented application system for Olympic Game Beijing 2008. In order to differentiate the services that are similar in function aspects and define the policy of service replacement, we need to build a description framework for the non-functional property of services and then implement the mechanism of the service selection based on both functional and non-functional information of services.In this thesis, we analyze the state-of-the-art research and challenges on non-functional property description, and then with the problems related with non-functional property that we were confronted in building the system FLAME2008, a description framework for non-functional property that suits to services-oriented applications is defined. We have implemented the framework in FLAME2008. The main research work and achievements of the thesis include:1) A conceptual description framework for non-functional properties is defined, which is suitable to services-oriented applications to guide developers to build their concrete description frameworks.2) We have defined the description structures and policies for each part of the...