Service Decoupler

Abstract

Service-oriented software, built using concrete services, tends to change with difficulty, as analogously happens in the objectoriented software when it uses concretions. Towards achieving dynamic decoupling, adapter-and abstraction-based approaches have been proposed, which aim at developing a single service-client for alternative services, i.e. services that offer the same or similar functionality, usually through syntactically similar interfaces. However, the aforementioned approaches do not propose fully dynamic-decoupling solutions, i.e. service invocations are not adapted in a completely seamless and dynamic way. Technically, the existing approaches realize the invocation of alternative services by using delegation, which implements complex service-translation scripts, (re-)configured at compile time. To go beyond the state-of-the-art, we propose the Service Façade pattern that leverages the case of syntactically similar interfaces, offering a unified service interface, based on which service invocations are seamlessly bound and adapted at runtime (late binding and dynamic adaptation, respectively). Technically, our pattern replaces delegation with service polymorphism, without needing the development of service-translation scripts. Moreover, the pattern structure, along with its client, are closed to modifications when new alternative services are incorporated. CCS Concepts: •Software and its engineering → Software design engineering;