Section: Scientific Foundations

Future Internet and SOA

Traditional information systems were built by integrating applications into a communication framework, such as CORBA or with an Enterprise Application Integration system (EAI). Today, companies need to be able to reconfigure themselves; they need to be able to include other companies' business, split or externalize some of their works very quickly. In order to do this, the information systems should react and adapt very efficiently. EAIs approaches did not provide the necessary agility because they were too tightly coupled and a large part of business processes were "hard wired" into company applications.

Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) partly provide agility because in SOA business processes are completely separated from applications which can only be viewed as providing services through an interface. With SOA technologies it is easily possible to modify business processes, change, add or remove services.

However, SOA and Web services technologies are mainly market-driven and sometimes far from the state-of-the-art of distributed systems. Achieving dependability or being able to guarantee Service Level Agreement (SLA) needs much more agility of software elements. Dynamic adaptability features are necessary at many different levels (business processes, service composition, service discovery and execution) and should be coordinated. When addressing very large scale systems, autonomic behaviour of services and other parts of service oriented architectures is necessary.

SOAs will be part of the "Future Internet". The "Future Internet" will encompass traditional Web servers and browsers to support companies and people interactions (Internet of services), media interactions, search systems, etc. It will include many appliances (Internet of things). The key research domains in this area are network research, cloud computing, Internet of services and advanced software engineering.

The Myriads team will address adaptability and autonomy of SOAs in the context of Grids, Clouds and at large scale.