Deployment of Services Applications in Services Execution Environments

Service-oriented computing defines a services application as an assembly of loosely coupled software elements: services. Today, SOC is very technology-driven. Engineers have to deal with numerous technologies for describing, publishing services and creating and manipulating services applications. In particular, deploying services applications is a complex task, reserved for experts. By deploying, we mean installing, activating, deactivating, maintaining and deinstalling services applications. This paper presents an approach for the context-aware deployment of services applications in constrained services execution environments. This approach is based on a meta-model which has been designed for describing services applications from a deployment point of view. This approach has been implemented in a tool (called Deployment Manager for Services Applications: DMSA). Using this approach and service substitutability enable proper deployment of services applications and re-use of service implementations already deployed (as wished in our context). This work has been validated on an industrial use case.