An Approach for Dynamically Building and Managing Service-Based Applications

Software Product Lines (SPLs) engineering aims to develop similar software systems by sharing a common set of software assets. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) uses services as fundamental elements for developing applications. SOC provide dynamic capabilities that are needed in many product-lines. SPLs provide useful mechanisms for modeling dynamic applications implemented through service compositions. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a three-phase approach that consolidates the two paradigms for developing dynamic service compositions. The proposed approach is supported by an integrated development environment including three tools. The first tool allows specifying product line architecture integrating variability model. The second tool allows defining service compositions via the assembly of service descriptions. Such service compositions are designed following the product line architecture. Executing applications made of service instances can be autonomously built by a runtime infrastructure. The paper exemplifies the use of the presented tools in the home hospitalization domain.