Section: New Software and Platforms

VSB: eVolution Service Bus for the Future Internet

Participants : Georgios Bouloukakis, Nikolaos Georgantas [contact] , Siddhartha Dutta.

URL: https://tuleap.ow2.org/plugins/git/chorevolution/evolution-service-bus

The eVolution Service Bus (VSB) is a development and runtime environment dedicated to complex distributed applications of the Future Internet. Such applications are open, dynamic choreographies of extremely heterogeneous services and Things, including lightweight embedded systems (e.g., sensors, actuators and networks of them), mobile systems (e.g., smartphone applications), and resource-rich IT systems (e.g., systems hosted on enterprise servers and Cloud infrastructures). VSB's objective is to seamlessly interconnect, inside choreographies, services and Things that employ heterogeneous interaction protocols at the middleware level, e.g., SOAP Web services, REST Web services, Things using CoAP (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252). This is based on runtime conversions between such protocols, with respect to their primitives and data type systems, while properly mapping between their semantics. This also includes mapping between the public interfaces of services/Things, regarding their operations and data, from the viewpoint of the middleware: the latter means that operations and data are converted based on their middleware-level semantics, while their business semantics remains transparent to the conversion.

VSB follows the well-known Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) paradigm. In this paradigm, a common intermediate bus protocol is used to facilitate interconnection between multiple heterogeneous middleware protocols. Conversion of each protocol to the common bus protocol is done by a component associated to the service/Thing in question and its middleware, called a Binding Component (BC), as it binds the service/Thing to the service bus. We introduce a generic architecture for VSB, which relies on the notion of Generic Middleware (GM) connector. GM abstracts interactions among peer components that employ the same middleware protocol through generic post and get operations, in a unifying fashion for any middleware protocol. We propose an API (application programming interface) for GM and a related generic interface description, which we call GIDL, for application components that (abstractly) employ GM. Concrete middleware protocols and related interface descriptions of application components that employ these middleware protocols can be mapped to GM API and GIDL, respectively. Based on these abstractions, we elaborate a generic architecture for BCs, as well as a related method for BC synthesis and refinement for a concrete choreography that includes services/Things with heterogeneous middleware protocols.

The eVolution Service Bus (VSB) presents a significant rethinking of the architecture and the implementation of a service bus destined to serve dynamic choreographies of services but also Things as first-class entities. More specifically, VSB presents the following advancements:

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  VSB is a unified interoperability solution for both services and Things participating in choreographies;

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  VSB is flexible and lightweight: it is a completely decentralized network of BCs that are deployed as necessary; hence, no BC is needed when a service/Thing employs the same middleware protocol as the one used as common bus protocol;

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  VSB provides support for the client-server, publish/subscribe, tuple space and data streaming interaction paradigms;

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  Different protocols can be introduced as VSB's common bus protocol with the same easiness as for integrating support for a new middleware protocol of a service/Thing; additionally, there is no need for relying on and/or providing a full-fledged ESB platform;

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  While very modular, VSB's architecture includes only few levels of indirection in the processing of primitives when converting between protocols; this makes it simple, lightweight and fast;

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  In VSB, mapping between a concrete middleware protocol and the GM paradigm can be performed in different ways, thus enabling to cover all possible interaction cases; there is no unique, fixed mapping limiting the applicability of the solution;

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  BC synthesis follows a systematic method allowing for its automation: we have developed related tools that support the automated generation of a BC for a service/Thing from its GIDL interface description.

VSB is being developed within the H2020 CHOReVOLUTION project (see § 8.2.1.1). It is also based on previous development carried out in the FP7 CHOReOS project (http://www.choreos.eu). VSB is available for download under open source license.