Tasks meet flows: Merging two paradigms in a Cloud applications development platform

Abstract

In this paper we present a new architecture for the Cloud Integrator platform that extends it in two directions. The first one aimed at improving the way of an application can be defined by a developer. Instead of dealing with the burden of defining applications only by specifying semantic workflows in terms of activities expressed as a tuple <;task, object>, a developer can rely on the definition of complete executions flows or partial execution flows. The second extension aimed at the automatic deployment of applications in a cloud platform, thus allowing the simultaneous use of it by several clients over the Internet. We also present a proof-of-concept that illustrates the use of the cloud-based platform in a flight booking application.