Abstract
Services are autonomous, self-describing, technology-neutral software units that can be described, published, discovered, and composed into software applications at run-time. Designing software services and composing services in order to form applications or composite services requires abstractions beyond those found in typical object-oriented programming languages. In this paper, we explore a number of the abstractions used in service-oriented computing and related Internet- and web-based programming models in the context of Creol, an executable concurrent object-oriented modeling language with active objects and futures; i.e., features capable of expressing and dealing with asynchronous actions. By adding various abstractions to the modeling language, we demonstrate how a concurrent object language may naturally address many of the requirements of service-oriented computing. The study of language extensions in the restricted setting of a small, high-level modeling language, such as Creol, suggests a cheap way of developing new abstractions for emerging application domains. In this paper, we explore abstractions in the context of service-oriented computing, particularly with regard to dynamic aspects such as service discovery and structuring mechanisms such as groups.
Einar Broch Johnsen
Professor
