METAFrame in Practice: Design of Intelligent Network Services

Scientific workflows with the jABC framework

“…The basic services from which the SLGs are constructed are called Service-Independent Building Blocks, or SIBs by analogy with the telecommunication terminology [107], and in the spirit of the Service-oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm [69,83]. SIBs can refer to any programmatically accessible piece of software functionality such as APIs, Web or REST Services, and command-line programs with scriptable interfaces.…”

“…[44,110,114]) in order to be able to validate the workflow logic as early in the design process and as precisely as possible. The built-in model checker has for instance been used for verifying the behaviour of telecommunication services [107,109,110], the ExoMars Rover [12], the OCS conference system [95], and the framework's code generator [46], and we demonstrated on a few examples how they could be applied to scientific workflow models [59]. However, while the methods for formal verification have been developed for decades and their use is increasing in many application domains, especially in the areas of embedded and critical systems, it has not received significant attention in the scientific workflow community so far.…”

“…The DaCapo and later the META-Frame Tool can be regarded as first service-oriented environments where tool building blocks could be graphically composed into workflows [77,111,121]. After an industrial project with Siemens Nixdorf in 1995/96, where this tool was applied to construct a service definition environment for value-added services that has subsequently been sold to over 30 Telecoms world-wide [19,107], the META-Frame tool was again renamed, now to Application Building Center (ABC), and later on re-implemented as the jABC tool in Java since 2003 and applied in numerous industrial and scientific projects (such as [9,10,40,52,73,95]). Driving forces for the further development were the scientific workflow projects reported in more detail in the course of this paper.…”

MaTRICS: A service-based management tool for remote intelligent configuration of systems

“…in Fig. 6, in the ABC a configuration service is logically defined by the corresponding workflow, modelled as its Service Logic Graph (SLG) [17,12].…”

“…This has the enormous advantage of providing a uniform operational modelling level at which developers of applications and system managers can share information and debug both design-level and runtime execution problems! We follow here the standard design methodology of the Agent Building Center (ABC), the service development environment we are using in different generations since 1995 [17] to develop e.g. applications in the area of telecommunications [18], internet services [9], test environments and test suites [4,12].…”