Prof. Schahram Dustdar

Today we are experiencing a major paradigm shift in the way that software applications are designed, architected, delivered, and consumed. Service-oriented Computing (SOC) is a new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Services are autonomous platform-inde­pen­dent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and pro­grammed using XML artifacts for the purpose of developing massively distributed interoperable applications. The application of the SoC model to Web resources to provide a loosely coupled model for distributed processing is manifested by Web services. Services are more than just software components; their platform neutral and self-describing nature and particularly their ability to enable business. Combined with recent developments in the area of distributed systems, workflow management systems, business protocols and languages, services can provide the automated support needed for e-business integration both at the data and business logic level. They also provide a sound support framework for developing complex business transaction sequences and business collaboration applications.