An architecting method for distributed process-intensive systems

This paper introduces an architecting method for distributed process-intensive systems. Traditional methods (e.g. object-orientation, structured analysis or component/service-based designs) decompose a process-intensive system into entities with attached domain-specific operations (process constituents). This results in fine-grained remote procedure calls in distributed systems which are often detrimental to quality attributes such as performance, loose-coupling, adaptability and interoperability. Our method tailors the representational state transfer (REST) principles used for hypermedia data transfer to process-intensive systems by making process constituents into resources, and attaching a set of standard operations. Distributed processes interoperate by adhering to these operations and exchanging process information. In our method, process information exchange contains not only typical meta-information about a process, but also process fragments that indicate possible next-steps and interconnectedness for process coordination purposes. We have implemented our method in a Web environment and conducted a case study providing initial validation of its benefits.