Reuse-Oriented Deployment of Software Components: Congregation in Service-Oriented Development

The reuse of services in service-oriented development has in general not reached the levels that were expected when Web services technologies were introduced. There are several reasons why this is the case including the lack of efficient service discovery mechanisms and also the low number of available services within service registries. However, the potential for reuse in service-oriented development is in general significantly increased, if besides already deployed Web services, also the regular software components available on the internet or within enterprises are considered as potential sources of services. To use these software components as services a mechanism is needed that systematically deploys and manages the associated assets and automatically makes them available for use by client applications. In this paper we will therefore introduce a new approach - called congregation - that supports the reuse of arbitrary software components by automatically deploying them as Web services for invocation by client applications and business processes in service-oriented software development.