Database Reference
In-Depth Information
service-oriented. The CBD method sample is selected and evaluated using the framework's
concepts and requirements. Based on the evaluation, the method improvements are proposed
in order to provide consistent, systematic, and integrated CBD and WS methodology sup-
port throughout the lifecycle.
INTRODUCTION
Modern enterprises are in the fl ux of rapid and often unpredictable changes in both
business and Information Technology (IT). New business demands caused by the enterprise's
need to be competitive on the market require an immediate support of the advanced IT solu-
tions. At the same time, new IT opportunities and achievements are constantly emerging and
must be rapidly adopted to provide new and more effective ways of conducting business.
Therefore, today more than ever it is important to provide an effective business/IT alignment
in order to produce high quality and fl exible software solutions within short time-to-market,
that as close as possible support business goals and match business needs.
During the last years, new development paradigms and models have been proposed to
support these aims. First Component-Based Development (CBD) (Brown & Wallnau, 1998),
and then Web Services (WS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) (IBM, 2003; W3C,
2003) have been introduced as the ways to build complex enterprise systems and provide
effective enterprise application integration. The CBD platforms and technologies, such as
CORBA Components, Sun's Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), and Microsoft's COM+/.NET are
now
de facto
standards in web-based systems development. On the other hand, the growing
interest in Web Services has resulted in a number of industry standards and initiatives (XML,
WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, etc.) (W3C, 2003). What they have in common is that CBD and
WS have both been fi rst introduced through new technology standards and infrastructures,
and after that corresponding methods, tools and modeling techniques have been proposed.
While the technology is a necessary element of any solution, it is not suffi cient on its own.
Methods, techniques and tools for developing component-oriented applications based on
business requirements are equally important (Welke, 1994). Such development methods
need to incorporate the concepts of component and service as an integral part of the whole
system life cycle, from business to implementation.
While there is an established development methodology practice in the case of CBD, in
the fi eld of WS and SOA, current achievements in this respect are much behind the technology
ones. The former question of how to make use of object-oriented methods and techniques in
practicing CBD is now largely replaced by whether and in what ways CBD methods can be
used in developing WS applications. Therefore, of great importance is proposing an approach
for architecting the system that consists of collaborating components and services. Such an
approach should specify the way of capturing and organizing business requirements within
the platform-independent logical system architecture that closely maps business concepts
and goals. The approach should further provide mapping of the architecture to the particu-
lar technology settings that ensures bi-directional traceability between business concepts
and implementation artifacts. This is the main idea behind the current Object Management
Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) (OMG, 2003).
Current object-oriented and component-based development methods do not provide
a necessary support for designing and developing component-based and service-oriented
business applications. Methods that have evolved from pure object-oriented backgrounds
