A Modeling and Executable Language for Designing and Prototyping Service-Oriented Applications

This paper presents an intuitive, precise and executable language, SCA-ASM, for model-based design and prototyping of service-oriented applications. The language combines the SCA (Service Component Architecture) capability of modeling and assembling heterogeneous service-oriented components in a technology agnostic way, with the rigor of the Abstract State Machines formal method able to model notions of service behavior, interactions, orchestration, compensation in an abstract but executable way. For an early and quick design evaluation of a composite software application, an SCA-ASM model of a service-oriented component, possibly not yet implemented in code or available as off-the-shelf, can be: (i) simulated and evaluated of fine, i.e. in isolation from the other components, (ii) configured in place within an SCA-compliant runtime platform as abstract implementation (or prototype) of a component and then executed together with the other components implementations according to the chosen SCA assembly.