Using components to provide a flexible adaptation loop to component-based SOA applications

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model fosters dynamic interactions of heterogeneous and loosely- coupled service providers and consumers. Specifications like the Service Component Architecture (SCA) have been used to tackle the complexity of developing such applications; however, concerns like runtime management and adaptation are left as platform specific matters. Though several solutions have been proposed, they have rarely been designed in an integrated way and with the capability to evolve the adaptation logic itself. This work presents a component based framework that allows the insertion of monitoring and management tasks, providing flexible autonomic behaviour to component-based SOA appli- cations. Each phase of the autonomic control loop is imple- mented by a different component, in such a way that different implementations can be developed for each phase and they can be replaced at runtime, providing support for evolving non- functional requirements. We present an illustrative scenario that is dynamically augmented with components to tackle non- functional concerns and support adaptation. We use an SCA compliant platform that allows distribution and architectural reconfiguration of components. Micro-benchmarks and a use case are presented to show the feasibility of our proposed implementation, and illustrate the practicality of the approach. Overall, we show that a component-based approach is suitable to provide autonomic and adaptable behaviour to component- based SOA applications.