A component-based middleware platform for reconfigurable service-oriented architectures

The Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a technology-independent standard for developing distributed Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SCA standard promotes the use of components and architecture descriptors, and mostly covers the life-cycle steps of implementation and deployment. Unfortunately, SCA does not address the governance of SCA applications and provides no support for the maintenance of deployed components. This article covers this issue and introduces the FRASCATI platform, a run-time support for SCA with dynamic reconfiguration capabilities and run-time management features. The article presents the internal component-based architecture of the FRASCATI platform, and highlights its key features. The component-based design of the FRASCATI platform introduces many degrees of flexibility and configurability in the platform itself and for the SOA applications it can host. The article reports on micro-benchmarks highlighting that run-time manageability in the FRASCATI platform does not decrease its performance when compared to the de facto reference SCA implementation: Apache TUSCANY. Finally, a smart home scenario illustrates the extension capabilities and the various reconfigurations of the FRASCAT