Extracting Dynamic Dependencies between Web Services Using Vector Clocks

Extracting Dynamic Dependencies between Web Services Using Vector Clocks

Romano, D.
Pinzger, M.
Bouwers, E.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2011-12-31

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables organizations to react to requirement changes in an agile manner and to foster the reuse of existing services. However, the dynamic nature of service oriented systems and their agility bear the challenge of properly understanding such systems. In particular, understanding the dependencies among services is a non trivial task, especially if service oriented systems are distributed over several hosts belonging to different departments of an organization. In this paper, we propose an approach to extract dynamic dependencies among web services. The approach is based on the vector clocks, originally conceived and used to order events in a distributed environment. We use the vector clocks to order service executions and to infer causal dependencies among services. We show the feasibility of the approach by implementing it into the Apache CXF framework and instrumenting the SOAP messages. We designed and executed two experiments to investigate the impact of the approach on the response time. The results show a slight increase that is deemed to be low in typical industrial service oriented systems. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), 2011, IEEE Computer Society.

web services
dynamic dependencies

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1f88e8fc-8978-4981-84c0-dcc0ae0f689a

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2011-034

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2011 The authors. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.