An Overview of the ServiceJ Research Project

Object-oriented programming languages are increas-ingly loosing pace with the rapidly evolving paradigm of Service-Oriented Computing. They provide no language support for discovering, selecting, or binding services. Ad-ditionally, they lack appropriate middleware platforms that adequately deal with the volatile and distributed nature of services. Programmers, then, become responsible for guar-anteeing the robustness of client-service interactions. In order to bridge the gap between Service-Oriented Computing and Object-Oriented Programming, we have designed a Java extension, ServiceJ, that introduces spe-cialized concepts for client-service interactions. During the ServiceJ-to-Java compilation process, all the neces-sary interactions for dealing with the challenges of Service-Oriented Computing are automatically injected. In this paper, we report on the current status of ServiceJ. We show how its language concepts ease the implementation of client-service interactions and we show how the compi-lation to Java is carried out. 1