EDRA: Event-Driven Response Architecture for Service-Based Computing

Service-based computing is rapidly replacing the more-traditional approaches to architecting distributed systems. The critical advantage of service-based architectures is that they require only a specification of protocol, and not of API. As such, they engender a significantly looser coupling than prior techniques, thus facilitating seamless collaboration across systems and across administrative domains. A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a middleware platform that provides a servicebased computing environment. The "publishfind-bind" paradigm at the core of SOA enables the development of service-provision software separately from the development of serviceconsumption software. Closer observation of each aspect in this paradigm reveals that significant developer involvement is still required to assist the interaction between service provider and consumer. Developers of service-consumer software make the decision to employ a set of service providers at development time. Some SOAs provide facilities to programmatically search, bind, and even invoke services dynamically. However, it is still assumed that knowledge of both service providers and the service provided is known at development time, or the client must suppl