Service Consumer Framework Managing Service Evolution from a Consumer Perspective

摘要

As the complexity of service-oriented applications grows, it is becoming essential to develop methods to manage service evolution and to ensure that the impact of changes on existing applications is minimized. Service evolution has been the subject of recent research interest, but most of the research on this topic deals with service evolution from the service provider perspective. There is an equal need to consider this problem from the perspective of service consumers and to develop effective methods that protect service consumer applications from changes in externally provided services. In this paper, we describe initial proposal for Service Consumer Framework that attempts to address this problem by providing resilience to changes in external services as these services are evolved or become temporarily unavailable. The framework incorporates a service router and services adaptors and determines runtime behavior of the system based on design-time decisions recorded in the service repository.