Managing Dynamic Service Dependencies

Abstract

We anticipate that software development will be service-centric in the near future. Applications will be created from existing services that are distributed throughout a network. Sure enough, management of those components will be mandatory. While service management is usually service-specific, a few areas can be identified that can be addressed in a generic way. One of these areas is the management of dependencies between services. Despite its genericity, this problem is currently mostly addressed in a service-specific way. This paper details the need for a generic dependency management approach, identifies the key properties of dependencies as well as the requirements for dependency management schemes, describes the model derived from the requirements, and presents an implementation using the Jini connection technology.