Space-Based Architectures as Abstraction Layer for Distributed Business Applications

For constantly changing businesses, it is essential that the underlying software architecture is capable of managing agile business processes and meeting future business needs. Decoupling between applications and services in distributed systems is addressed by e. g., service-oriented architectures. On the other hand, applications and its underlying middleware are still tightly coupled with respect to the middleware´s architectural style. As a result of the tight coupling middleware adaptations introduced due to e. g., new business requirements can affect the application as well. In this paper we propose the concept of space-based architecture (SBA), that allows decoupling distributed applications with respect to the underlying middleware architecture by combining the characteristics and properties of state-of-the-art middleware architectural styles captured in a simple API. The benefit of our approach is minimal application adaptations in case of changing the underlying middleware architectural style, which allows for more efficient realization of new business requirements.