Modeling and design of service-oriented architecture

Component-based development (CBD) and Web services (WS) are today widely used for building flexible enterprise-scale systems organized in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In order to gain the full benefits of the emerging technology and standards, an effective approach for modeling and designing this complex distributed computing model is required. Current efforts in this direction are much behind the technology ones. This work presents an approach to SOA modeling and design based on the concept of service component and standard UML modeling constructs. The interface of a service component goes well beyond the list of operation signatures to specify the complete contract between the service provider and consumer. The paper defines service components of different types, scope and granularity and puts them in the context of a model-driven design approach to provide bidirectional traceability between business requirements and software artifacts.