Architectures, Concepts and Technologies for Service Oriented Computing: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop ACT4SOC 2008

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Architectures, Concepts and Technologies for Service Oriented Computing (ACT4SOC 2008), held on July 5 in Porto, Portugal, in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2008). The ACT4SOC workshop aims at serving as a forum for researchers and practitioners, from academia and industry, to meet and to discuss the goals, benefits, achievements and challenges of Service Oriented Computing (SOC). SOC has emerged as a helpful paradigm for designing, building and using IT solutions, based on a set of architectural guidelines and concepts referred to as the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOC/SOA can be seen as a next step in the evolution of modular middleware approaches, such as CORBA, DCOM and J2EE. The objective of SOA is to make the development of IT solutions easier and more cost-effective through the adoption of service orientation. Service orientation has service as its central concept to denote a function independent of its possible implementations and independent of its possible user environments. Moreover, service orientation entails the existence of a distributed computing platform, which supports registration of services, discovery of services, invocation of services, and coordination of services. This foundation, when underlain with proper technology, contributes to important business objectives, including 'plug-and-play' interoperability through 'loose coupling' and 'technology transparency'. Although SOA is independent of any specific technology or technology platform, its benefits can only be achieved through the support from concrete technology. The current technology of choice for realizing SOA is Web services, which comprise practical base standards for service orientation, while building on the popularity of Web technology and ubiquitous Internet standards. The uptake of Web services based SOC is impressive, but Web services still have important limitations, and they are by no way a complete and satisfactory realization of the distributed computing platform for SOC. Many practical and fundamental challenges remain and need to be addressed in order to achieve the full potential of SOC. Among these are more advanced service-oriented middleware solutions supporting dynamic (re-) configuration and end-to-end security; service engineering approaches supporting business-technology alignment, design principles, and flexible analysis; and service composition approaches supporting dynamic composition with quality- and context-awareness. The goal of this workshop is to focus on the fundamental challenges related to SOC, to discuss what architectural/conceptual foundation is needed, and how this foundation can be supported by new or (extensions of) available technology. This year 7 papers were selected, based on a thorough review process, in which each paper was reviewed by at least 3 experts in the field. Due to the number of reviews and the professionalism of the authors, program committee members and reviewers, I am confident that all selected papers are of high quality. The selected papers are also a good illustration of different challenges that were mentioned earlier. They have been grouped in three presentation sessions during the workshop, named "Architectures - Service-Oriented Middleware", "Concepts - Design, Development and Analysis of Services" and "Technologies - Dynamic Service Composition".