Aspect-driven context-aware services

Abstract

Nowadays enterprise software solutions must deal with ever-growing complexity and a multitude of business processes. The mainstream system design decomposes the system into small reusable services. While these services isolate certain system logic and address efficient elasticity towards growing user demands, there are multiple issues related to such a design, such as limitations to deal with restated information, information reuse or the ability to address cross-cutting concerns across multiple services. This paper highlights limitations of service-oriented architecture and proposes an alternative decomposition through aspect-driven service-oriented architecture. Such architecture involves adaptive, context-aware services preserving simple maintenance while addressing information reuse and crosscuts across services. The paper provides a formal description of the proposed architecture as well as a demonstration through a case study, showing approach properties and benefits.