Service-Oriented Computing Kit

Abstract

This paper describes a service-oriented computing kit (SOCK), which is an overarching framework covering the key artifacts in planning, modeling, designing, developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented solutions in the enterprise computing space. Based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, this comprehensive kit is a systematic taxonomy to abstract complexities and organize the major aspects of service-oriented development, so that the roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, skillsets, procedures and deliverables can be clearly defined for the IT teams to effectively construct service-oriented systems. SOCK comprises eight modules - architecture, process, integration, environment, technology, development, management, and roadmap. Each module addresses specific technical concerns in particular areas. SOA provides the service definitions, service catalog, service composition, scope of applications and portfolios, and service architecture modeling methodology. SOP deals with the business process management, process modeling and notations, process orchestration, coordination/collaborations, human interactions, and 1-phase commit compensation for long-lived processes. SOI concentrates on the service interoperability, integration patterns, enterprise service bus, traditional synchronous/asynchronous enterprise application integration, and integration with portals and content management systems. SOE consists of the runtime infrastructure, service registry for discovery and directory, service transformation/routing gateway, service virtualization via grid computing, and quality-of-services compliance with service-level agreements. SOT covers the implementation technologies - Web services, standards and specifications, technical patterns, convergence, and aspect-oriented techniques. SOD is composed of the development lifecycle, programming model, design/development tools, frameworks, reusable utilities/toolkits/components, and model-driven approaches. SOM includes services & policies repository in service identification and categorization, security mechanisms, business activity monitoring, reporting, BI, and provisioning. SOR handles the planning/blueprint, strategy, KPI dashboards, governance, and organization. The elements in each module are further decomposed to form loose semantic associations. This holistic kit has been implemented on an open source mind-mapping platform, which is used in guiding the migration from the conventional multi-tier Web application style to a service-oriented paradigm in the financial services sector, and SOCK has proven to be an effective approach to pragmatically transitioning to the new computing mode