Programming evolvable web services

Abstract

Web services have emerged as a technology for designing and composing distributed applications. Recent research increasingly addressed the need to adapt such systems based on changing requirements and environmental constraints. From the developers point of view, it is already a daunting task to update the description, implementation, or configuration of individual services that are already deployed in the runtime environment. A major undertaking is update and maintenance of large scale service environments. In this work, we introduce a programming model enabling the adaptation and evolution of service-oriented systems in a simple and intuitive way. Most existing work focuses on self-adaptation aspects. We present a user-centric approach and a framework supporting both automatic mechanisms for adaptation and foremost a programming model to reduce the burden of reconfiguration, update, and customization of service-based applications. We implemented the programming model on top of Genesis, a Java-based Web services framework.