A non-invasive approach to dynamic Web services provisioning

Service-oriented computing has emerged as a new component-based software development paradigm in a network-centric environment. By using a standard description language and protocol, services can be used to wrap legacy software systems to be integrated beyond the enterprise boundary across heterogeneous platforms. Nevertheless, the challenges come in tandem with the opportunities because of the inherent dynamic characteristics within a distributed environment. In particular, there is a need for dynamic adaptation for provisioned services to accommodate the ever-changing business requirements externally as well as the computing resource status internally, while maintaining the continuousness of service provisioning. We present a dynamic Web service provisioning approach based on .NET common language runtime, one of the two primary Web services platforms, exploring the runtime code manipulation at the intermediate language (IL) level rather than at the source code level. Meanwhile, we show how the service provisioning can be adapted in a modularized way by complementing the conventional service-oriented architecture (SOA) with a repository of adaptation aspects. Moreover, we demonstrate how dynamic service provisioning can be used for nonfunctional property assurance.