SOAR: Towards dependable Service-Oriented Architecture via reflective middleware

The dependability of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is usually achieved by dynamic binding and switching of replicated services, which is insufficient to handle the whole SOA system and the tradeoff between dependability and other qualities, like performance. We propose a reflective middleware based approach, called SOAR (SOA with Reflection), to dependable SOA systems. It makes four contributions: First, defining a meta model for capturing dependability threats according to SOA characteristics. Second, identifying four dependability mechanisms and their impacts on other qualities. Third, building a mathematic foundation for the tradeoff between dependability and other qualities. Fourth, demonstrating SOAR on reflective J2EE. Copyright ? 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.EI01-255-65