Carbon: towards a server building framework for SOA platform

SOA proposes an architecture that composes many services together in a loosely coupled manner, and those services may provide a wide spectrum of features like implementing Business Logic, supporting Service Orchestration, Service Mediation, and Eventing, etc. Each user would, typically, choose a subset of these features and build his architecture on them. Although it is conceptually possible to fit all the features into the same server, due to performance and modularity concerns, the functionalities are broken across several servers and deployed rather than deploying as a single server. This paper presents Carbon, a component based server building framework that allows users to pick and choose different SOA concepts and build their own customized servers. Furthermore, the same framework enables those different features to share cross cutting concerns like storage, security, user interfaces, throttling, eventing etc., thus simplifying the server development process and reducing the footprint of the overall implementation. We present Carbon, the design decisions, and architecture while comparing and contrasting the proposed framework with other component based frameworks. The primary contributions of this paper are proposing a server building framework for SOA platform, taking initial steps towards defining and implementing such a framework, and sharing experiences of building and using the framework in real world settings. Furthermore, we propose a minimal kernel for SOA upon which the proposed platform can be constructed.