An Integrated Development Environment For Dynamically Evolving Service-Oriented Applications

Nowadays, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the mainstream paradigm for development and integration of distributed applications. In SOA, services are the basic elements in development processes, and the service composition as well as the coordination can be considered as the effective solution used for developing applications. In related studies, the software architecture and the process-oriented language BPEL, which are two of the most significant service composition approaches, can be used to describe the service coordination logic from different aspects; meanwhile, in open Internet environments, how to evolve the software system to meet changing environment and requirements has already been a key characteristic for keeping software’s business. Currently, there are many proposals that focus on software architecture evolution and process evolution. The continually developing software technologies require correspondingly development environment, so how to properly design and effectively implement an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for dynamically evolving service-oriented applications is an important topic of current researches.Although there are some visual development tools for SOA, we find that they are more or less limited in the support for dynamic system evolution. We need a service-based integrated development environment framework that can be used to help users accomplish the tasks of service composition modeling, service deploying and runtime information collection in the views of system architectures and processes based on workflow. Furthermore, a visualized mechanism for showing the different aspects of evolution must be provided to help users understand and manipulate the structure and runtime information of the system under development. To this end, we have made following efforts and contributions:1) We proposed a service-based integrated development environment framework Artemis for dynamically evolving service-oriented applications. It provides graphical modeling, deploying and a suite of communication facilities, as well as dynamic evolution supporting module.2) Based on the framework above, we designed and implemented a service-based integrated development environment Artemis-VIDE on top of the Eclipse platform, which featured the support for dynamic system evolution.3) We conducted a case study with the Artemis-VIDE. The scenario was taken from the application domain of flood control of the Yellow River. The case study gave a preliminarily evaluation of the benefits of using Artemis-VIDE in developing dynamically evolving service-oriented applications.