Research For Services Interoperability In SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architecture that aims to achieve distributed deployment, composition, and utilization for loose coupling and coarse grained interacting software agents. SOA is conducive to resolve the problems of mutual communication and data exchange between heterogeneous systems and is propitious to achieve high-quality interoperability for the services in the architecture. However, there are some interoperability problems in the process of service implementing. The interoperability problems are resolved by means of the test and evaluation involved technologies, which is based on the service description for SOA.In order to achieve high-quality interoperability between services, we must make accurate description of the services in the architecture. We propose an approach which implements the service description for SOA. Based on the module-based methods for service description and the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), we analyze the relevant agreements, standards and protocols for WSDL. The descriptions for data type, service access interface, construction & transfer of communication information and service access entrance in web service are also proposed. Using the techniques of Java reflection and Extensible Markup Language, a prototype system is developed to implement the service description in the protocol of WSDL.Further more, an approach of consistency test on service description for the service description document generated by the prototype system is proposed. We test the consistency of the generated service description document from the following aspects: the format of the service description document, the description of data types, service access interface, construction & transfer of communication information and service access entrance. Based on this approach, the interoperability test is implemented on the service description in accordance with the standard confirmation process for common service description documents.Finally, the interoperability test and the standard confirmation are proposed in experiments. The experiments show that the documents generated by the prototype system contain all the service description information for the services, with the interoperability problems on data type and naming space involved.