Recently, Web services have become pervasive and critical to business operations in enterprise. They simplify interoperability and application integration. They provide a means for wrapping existing applications so developers can access those applications through standard languages and protocols. For the reason, many corporations make the effort to build the Enterprise Web Services Environment (EWSE), which integrates enterprise applications and supports business operations by using Web services technologies. In EWSE, enterprises can flexibly solve enterprise-wide integration challenges and thereby quickly address ever-changing business challenges and opportunities.
EWSE contains not only Web services but also service interactions. Those interactions between Web services are the key to support business process. Once services and business processes become operational, their progress must be managed and monitored to offer a clear view of those services perform within their operational environments. Besides, those services and business processes should provide a way to perform control actions to modify and adjust their behaviors.
Therefore, managers will know enterprise status and make response quickly. To archive the goals, it requires distributed management solutions for EWSW.
Management in this case is defined as a set of capabilities for discovering the existence, availability, health, and usage, as well as the control and configuration of resources, where resources are defined as Web services, components of the Web services architecture, as well as roles undertaken in this architecture. It does not
only handle single service status, but also cover service interaction and business process.
Although there are many Web services management standards, most of them cannot cover both single service management and services interactions. They usually define Web services management interfaces for management operations as well as message parameters. Because those management standards use Web services technology, different management applications and services can exchange information easily. However, those standards focus only on management protocols and functions. It means that both system designers and developers have to pay extra efforts for those management protocols and functions. Because management functions cannot solve business problems directly, some corporations may feel that developing those functions waste many resources.
In the meantime, controlling and monitoring single service are not enough.
Without handling services interactions properly, it is not easy to guarantee that they can deal with all requests accurately. Some industry products and standards provide functions to manage business processes, like Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). It defines application interfaces to develop a service and use an engine for business processes execution as well as services communications. Conforming to the standards, all Web services should follow the application interfaces and can only interact with the engine. The drawbacks of this architecture are that a Web service cannot be managed out of engine. Besides, developing a service becomes very complex because programmers have to follow the application interfaces. For the reason, it is necessary to develop a solution that can manage business process without complex developing.
Because management in EWSE is quite different from traditional enterprise systems, it will have different requirements and solutions. It should solve the following problems:
1. A uniform management interface: a uniform management interface can manage all services from a single management application. It will define how to monitor service status and configure services to archive management goals. A uniform and standard interface can reduce system administrator’s effort. In EWSE, Web services technology is a good choice to create the interface.
2. Services interoperability monitor: services interoperability can composite complete services or business processes. Tracking and handling interoperability can show not only the status of each service request, but also the entire EWSE status.
3. Integration with existed environment easy: to add management functions, applications have to be modified many program code. For SOA, the program code is usually very complex. It is necessary to make it become easy.
In this dissertation, a distributed management mechanism for EWSE is proposed. It provides management interfaces for each Web services and handles message flows among services with the minimal effort. Programmers can only create the management functions without writing Web services definitions and knowing several standards. Because the Web services definitions and codes are generated, programmers can more focus on management functions. On the other hand, using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), the message tracking features can be added into existed system without modifying service code. At system run-time, because the management service and business service are separated, they will not influence each other. It can guarantee the performance of business services. Finally, we
provide reference architecture for adding management features in EWSE.
Enterprise can use the management mechanism to build up better quality services and then enhance its productivity as well as competitiveness.
The dissertation is organized as followed: Chapter 2 introduces the backgrounds and industry status. Chapter 3 shows our management architecture and components.
Chapter 4 will discuss the interactions between Web services and monitor mechanism. Chapter 5 is the reference architecture and program examples. Chapter 6 will evaluate the system. Finally, Chapter 7 is the conclusion and future works.