Service Packaging: A Pattern Based Approach Towards Service Delivery

Authentication, authorization, billing and monitoring are all common service delivery functions that are generally required to be added on to core business services in order for them to be delivered online commercially. Extending core services with these service delivery functions requires considerable effort if implemented ground-up and can be subject to limitations if outsourced to a service broker or a conventional middleware platform. Because of the ubiquitous nature of these service delivery functions, we see them as reusable patterns for service delivery. In this paper we have introduce an approach to implementing and applying these patterns in business to consumer e-commerce. We name the approach Service Packaging. Through the approach, generic implementations (or service packages) of the various service delivery patterns can be incrementally applied to core services, thus enabling flexible and systematic service delivery. A core service, regardless of its business domain does not require any structural or behavioral modifications in order to conform to a specific service delivery requirement and hence can be used out of the box. We also present a prototype middleware platform for the design-time modeling and implementation of service packages as well as their runtime execution.