VARIABILITY MODELING TO DEVELOP FLEXIBLE SERVICE-ORIENTED APPLICATIONS

To cope with requirement changes flexibly and rapidly,the existing component-based paradigm is being evolved into a service-oriented computing paradigm.The main characteristic of the service-oriented computing paradigm is that service-oriented applications are developed as loosely coupled services that reflect business concerns.This paradigm also promotes business agility,facilitating quick reactions to business changes.Therefore,to enhance and support the benefits of the service-oriented computing paradigm,we must consider how to improve flexibility and reusability during the development of service-oriented applications.We propose the variability modeling approach to specify and control the common and distinguishing characteristics of service-oriented applications.That is,the key concepts of product-line technology can be used to make service-oriented applications more flexible and reusable.This paper describes variability modeling at two levels;the composition level and the specification level.At the composition level,we describe the variability of composition and the flow of domain services that fulfill business processes.At the specification level,we present a domain service that is an abstract service with variability.The use of our systematic variability modeling approach can greatly increase the flexibility,applicability,and reusability of service-oriented applications.