| Service-oriented computing has dramatically changed the way in which we develop software systems. In the fast growing global market for services, providing competitive services to these markets is critical for the success of businesses and organizations. Since many competitive services have already been implemented in existing systems, leveraging the value of an existing system by exposing all or parts of it as services within a service-oriented environment has become a major concern in today's industry. In this work, we categorize services embedded in a system into two categories: (i) Top-level services that are not used by another service but may contain a hierarchy of low-level services further describing and modularizing the service, and (ii) Low-level services that are underneath a top-level service and may be agglomerated with other low-level services to yield a new service with a higher level of granularity. To meet the demand of identifying and reusing the business services embedded in an existing software system, we present a novel service-oriented componentization framework that automatically supports: (i) identifying critical business services embedded in an existing Java system by utilizing graph representations of the system models, (ii) realizing each identified service as a self-contained component that can be deployed as a single unit, and (iii) transforming the object-oriented design into a service-oriented architecture. A toolkit implementing our framework has been developed as an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application. Our initial evaluation has shown that the proposed framework is effective in identifying services from an object-oriented design and migrating it to a service-oriented architecture. |
