Reducing complexity in service development and integration

Abstract

The continuous growth and increasing complexity of distributed systems software has produced a need for software development tools and techniques that reduce the learning requirements and complexity of building distributed systems. In this work we address reduction of complexity in service-oriented software development and present an approach and a toolkit for multi-language service development based on three building blocks: a simplified service description language, an intuitive message serialization and transport protocol, and a set of code generation techniques that provide boilerplate environments for service implementations. The toolkit is intended for use in the eScience domain and is presented along with a performance evaluation that quantifies toolkit performance against that of selected alternative toolkits and technologies for service development. Toolkit performance is found to be comparable to or improve upon the performance of evaluated technologies.