The PLASTIC Framework and Tools for Testing Service-Oriented Applications

Abstract

Abstract. The emergence of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is changing the way in which software applications are developed. A serviceoriented application consists of the dynamic composition of autonomous services independently developed by different organizations and deployed on heterogenous networks. Therefore, validation of SOA poses several new challenges, without offering any discount for the more traditional testing problems. In this chapter we overview the PLASTIC validation framework in which different techniques can be combined for the verification of both functional and extra-functional properties, spanning over both off-line and on-line testing stages. The former stage concerns development time testing, at which services are exercised in a simulated environment. The latter foresees the monitoring of a service live usage, to dynamically reveal possible deviations from the expected behaviour. Some techniques and tools which fit within the outlined framework are presented.

Run-Time Monitoring for Model-Based Testing of Distributed Systems

“…The ideas that are closely related to ours and, more importantly, already implemented in the Plastic Validation Framework [12] were expressed in the works of Bertolino et al [13] [14] [15]. The concept of the model-based generation of the test environment, expressed in [14] is very close to our approach.…”

iCompose: context-aware physical user interface for application composition

“…For instance, Chantzara et al [13] and Takemoto et al [63] studied service provisioning issues, Bertolino et al [5] and Butford et al [10] tackled service validation and trust issues, Kalasapur et al [26] targeted optimization of service communication paths, Nakazawa et al [39] focused on automatic generation of application code, Rigole et al [51,52] addressed distributed user interface deployment, Mungellini et al [36] applied composition to fast-prototype multimodal applications, Sousa et al, Ben Mokhtar et al, Cang et al and Lindenberg et al [4,12,30,61] introduced specification languages for querying and describing application composition, and finally, Sousa et al [62] and Paluska et al [43] introduced design styles for developing adaptive applications through composition. A number of authors surveyed application composition approaches in ubiquitous computing.…”

“…iCompose and the QuizBlasters application are implemented as a set of J2ME Midlets which communicate with the corresponding server components using RESTful HTTP (see Figure 8). We use XML and JSON 5 as the HTTP payload format and kXML2 library 6 for parsing XML messages. The iCompose component and the application are implemented as shown in Figure 9.…”

The Performance Cockpit Approach: A Framework For Systematic Performance Evaluations

“…The PLASTIC framework for testing service-oriented architectures aims at enabling online and offline testing of networked applications, encompassing functional and non-functional properties [2]. The framework integrates a set of tools for generating and executing test scenarios as well as for monitoring different metrics in service-oriented applications.…”