An approach to ensure service behavior consistency in OSGi

Open service gateway initiative (OSGi), a service-oriented component model which follows the concepts of service-oriented programming, significantly reduces the time and complexity to construct applications by registering and discovering services. However, this mechanism focusing on the interfaces and static properties of related services, ignores the behavior of the services, let alone the runtime errors caused by behavior inconsistency. In addition to the related theory of service behavior model and behavior consistency relation of single services in service discovery and substitution, this article defines coordination protocol, composite service and behavior consistent service coordination to handle the applications built on multiple services. On the top of OSGi, we propose a feasible middleware architecture called SOBECA, which includes a runtime environment and a development toolkit to facilitate the development of service behavior consistent applications.