An Aspect-Oriented Framework for Service Adaptation

Web services are emerging technologies for integrating heterogeneous applications. In application integration, the internal services are interconnected with other external resources to form a virtual enterprise. This puts new requirements on the standardization in terms of external specification, i.e., a combination of service interfaces and business protocols, that interconnected services have to obey. However, previously developed service implementations do not always conform to the standard and require adjustment.

In this paper, we characterize the problem of aligning internal service implementation to a standardized external specification. We propose an Aspect oriented framework as a solution to provide support for service adaptation. In particular, the framework consists of i) a taxonomy of the different possible types of mismatch between external specification and service implementation, ii) a repository of aspect-based templates to automate the task of handling mismatches, and iii) a tool to support template instantiation and their execution together with the service implementation.