A Development Approach for Workflow-Based E-Commerce using ReusableDistributed Components

摘要

With the emergence of component-based technologies,rnthere is a push toward software reuse. Reusable softwarerncomponents, such as Java Beans, ActiveX components,rnCOM objects, registry services, etc., can be used tornsupport a wide variety of distributed services. The reusernof such components has reduced the need for full lifecyclerndevelopment and deployment, both in research andrnindustry. Such “top-down” approaches are becomingrnimpractical, while there is the increasing trend towardrnintegrating reusable components from bottom up.rnFurthermore, the use of technologies like introspectionrnand reflection has relinquished the design-time constraintrnof having source code in order to integrate suchrncomponents. The implications of the aforementionedrntechnologies suggest that future development processesrnwill reside on the end-user’s workstation. Consequently,rnend-users will produce their own systems as a product ofrnconfiguring multiple 3rd party components (i.e. softwarern“plug-and-play” (Bronsard, et al., 1997)). With this inrnmind, the remaining problem is how to automate thisrnconfiguration to respect some user-determined policy ofrninteraction. One such policy is the implementation ofrnworkflow. This paper describes a specification-drivenrnapproach, WARP, to configuring components accordingrnto workflow. This approach entails a process and anrnagent-based architecture and implementation that supportsrnthe “bottom-up” configuration and reconfiguration ofrnreusable component-based distributed services.