A service management facility for the Java™ platform

Managing operational and semantic inter dependencies among software services is a relatively unexplored topic, despite its relevance to automating service deployments and to increased availability. In this paper we describe a framework for structured and programmatic dependency management among services written in the Java™ programming language. The framework´s interface allows for defining an acyclic graph of dependencies. The graph´s structure reflects the startup sequence of managed services. Upon a service failure or intentional termination, the dependencies are consulted to determine which services may be affected. If the dependencies so dictate, a service that has gone off-line will automatically be restarted. The requisite changes, e.g., restarting, will be propagated along the graph´s edges to ensure that the required dependencies are satisfied for each service. We demonstrate the usefulness of this framework through real-life case studies.