Moving from Internal to External Services Using Aspects

Abstract

Service oriented computing and web service technologies provide the means to structure an organisation's internal IT resources into a highly integrated network of services. In e-business and business process integration the internal services are interconnected with other, external organisations' resources to form virtual organisations. This move from using services internally to external use puts new non-functional requirements on the service implementation. Without any supporting technologies, meeting these new requirements can result in re-writing or changing a large part of the service implementation. In this paper we argue that aspect oriented programming is an important technique that can be used to facilitate the implementation of the new requirements that arises when moving from internal to external services. The suggested solution is illustrated by an example where quality of service metrics is implemented by using aspect oriented programming.