An Approach for SOA Design Patterns Composition

Software design patterns provide architects and developers with reusable software elements helping them to master building complex software systems. Nevertheless, presented in an informal way, software design patterns may give rise to ambiguity and may lead to their incorrect usage as well as incorrect compositions. We focus here on SOA design patterns composition and we propose a precise definition of the composition process with the semi-formal SoaML standard language. In this paper, we present an approach for composing SOA design patterns. The notion of patterns composition is defined based on two operators. The application of composition rules and the concretization of merging operators lead to the final description of the resulting compound pattern. Our approach covers both structural and behavioral features of composed patterns. To help non-specialists understanding the proposed approach, we illustrate it in details through the compound Service Broker pattern.