A rule-centric architectural conceptualization for service-oriented applications and its aspectual extension

Whereas cross-organizations are under swift competition to operate in unanticipated and dynamic business environment, current service composition standards (e.g. BPEL, WS-CDL) are strictly manual and static. In other words, besides ensuring adaptability at-design time, it is also crucial to cope with runtime adaptability in a very effective manner. The main purpose of this paper is thus to come up with an aspectual architectural approach, that is independent from any service technology and infrastructural issues. The approach is further required to promote (both at design- and runtime-) adaptation at the intra- and inter-services composition-level. This conceptual approach will be explained and illustrated using a simplified service-oriented banking case-study. In the remaining of this paper, we first motivate the approach by highlighting its main steps and conceptual milestones. We then detail the conceptual architectural level and illustrate it through a simplified banking application. After that, we present how to integrate aspect-oriented mechanisms into this ECA-based architecture so that it becomes dynamically adaptable.