Non-functional integration and coordination of distributed component services

The integration of distributed services has been identified as one of the most important challenges of E-business technology. A great deal of progress has been made in the development of methods and techniques for the integration of distributed components but most of the solutions tends to focus on the problem of syntactical and semantical compatibility of the functional services provided or required by the components. Although the non-functional properties of the services are equally important, because of the difficulties in representing and controlling them, they are usually neglected. This paper investigates the problem of non-functional integration and coordination of distributed components and describes a framework that presents a solution to the problem. The framework is based on the idea of defining the non-functional properties of the services at the early stages of the design and incorporating such properties within the architecture of the application so it can ease their management and control at run time