WIRE – Web service Interface Revision Environment

Upgrading a service in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be costly and inefficient, especially since in SOA environments services typically depend on other services in a system-of-systems context. ATC-NY, together with Architecture Technology Corporation, will develop WIRE (Web service Interface Revision Environment), a system designed to efficiently manage version problems in a large distributed network of services. In Phase I we designed a framework for web service version control, created versioning support for WSDL, created SOAP translation components to translate requests from one service version to another, and created a prototype management system to efficiently manage a large distribution of services and assess the system impact by analyzing the services dependencies. We designed our framework to be extensible and scalable to many SOA enterprise environments. In Phase II we will create a full-featured application to aid service developers and administrators, develop support for other SOA interfaces and technologies, enhance the WIRE framework to provide more conveniences to end-users when services are revised, and test WIRE in realistic environments. We will also use Boeings InfoGlue framework as a test-bed.  This will help to provide commercial requirements and construct scenarios for use in demonstrations.   BENEFITS: Using WIRE will decrease the expense and time required to maintain web services which work reliably in spite of changes to other services with which they interact in a system-of-systems environment.  In particular, WIRE benefits two roles of users: service developers and service administrators. Service developers benefit because WIRE allows them to smoothly maintain service version control (currently there are no standard version control systems for web services). Service administrators benefit because WIRE will help them to assess the system impact before launching new revisions. WIRE will do this by providing a visual dependency graph to show how services depend on each other and also providing helpful data such as usage statistics and domain information.  Thus service administrators will be able to make better informed decisions when deprecating or revising services.  WIRE does not depend upon any particular ESB software or require modifications to existing ESB components or architecture.