The Time-Dependent Execution Design Pattern describes a way of temporally decoupling a client and a server instance, based on the possibility to specify a point in time at which the operation required by the client instance will be executed on the server instance.

Situational method engineering is an approach to dynamically configure method fragments. In doing so, complete methods can be tailored to suit concrete project situations. Identifying such situations and selecting appropriate fragments is crucial for a successful method engineering process. In the field of service identification for service-oriented architectures most existing methods follow a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to acknowledge the broad variety of concrete circumstances that form the organizational context. In this paper, we argue that situational method engineering can be used to tailor service identification methods to particular application contexts. As a first step towards this goal, we analyze two explorative case studies and related literature to derive a basic set of relevant context factors. Moreover, the influence of these context factors on the selection and configuration of method fragments is examined. Adapting service identification methods to concrete project situations will improve their applicability and lead to a better service design.

Although the service-oriented paradigm has been well established in the technical domain for quite some time now, service governance is still considered a research gap. To ensure adequate governance, there is a necessity to manage services as first-class assets throughout the lifecycle. Now that the concept of service-orientation is also increasingly applied on the business level to structure an organisation's capabilities, the problem has become an even bigger challenge. This paper presents a generic business and software service lifecycle and aligns it with the common management layers in organisations. Using service analysis as an example, it moreover illustrates how activities in the service lifecycle may vary on lower levels of granularity depending on the focus on business or software services.

Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, a review, analysis, and evaluation of the 30 existing service analysis approaches presented in this paper have shown that a comprehensive approach to the identification and analysis of both business and supporting software services is missing. Based on this evaluation of existing approaches and additional sources, we close this gap by proposing an integrated, consolidated approach to business and software service analysis that combines and extends the strengths of the examined methodologies.

The use of dynamic properties in CORBA applications is supported by CORBA 's Property Service. This service, however, does not support temporary properties with restricted lifetimes. In this paper, we describe an easy-to-use Enhanced Property Service (EPS) that provides the required additional functionality while being backwards compatible to the original Property Service. Furthermore, we point out an interesting application of that new service for CORBA applications that not only need properties but also require support of the concept of leasing. Leasing is well-known from business world contexts, but has been leveraged in the software engineering domain recently, e.g. in the architecture ofJini. Up to now, leasing has not found its way into the CORBA environment. We describe an approach to the realization of leasing in CORBA based on the use of temporary properties representing "leases". After a brief introduction to the leasing concept, we take a detailed look at the concept of properties in CORBA by reviewing CORBA's Property Service, pointing out its disadvantages, and discussing the extensions to the Property Service mentioned above. The paper concludes with basic considerations concerning the question how the EPS could be used to implement leasing in CORBA

Abstract Part of the number of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) services specified by the Object Management Group is CORBA's Property Service (PS), which can be used to provide CORBA objects dynamically with additional properties not declared in their static Interface Description Language (IDL) type definitions. Although the management of dynamic properties is a common requirement for several application purposes, the support offered by CORBA's PS is very limited. One shortcoming, for example, is the fact that the PS specification considers the association between objects and properties an implementation detail, which is completely delegated to the developers of applications that require property management. Moreover, CORBA's PS does not support the definition of properties with lifetime restrictions, i.e. it is not possible to specify properties that are only allowed to exist for a certain period of time. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing an extended version of CORBA's PS, which provides explicit property set/object associations managed by the service and integrates the aspect of temporary properties. A primary goal in our design of the Enhanced PS was smoothness of the extensions with respect to downward compatibility with the original specification. In addition, we intended to simplify the integration of the new functionality in CORBA applications that need to utilize the enhanced features. We provide a detailed description of the design of our Enhanced PS by explaining IDL code fragments and offering Unified Modeling Language diagrams. In addition, some implementation aspects concerning our Java‐based prototype of the new service are discussed and the results of several benchmarking runs are presented. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract As the leading vendor of enterprise business standard software, SAP has recognized the need to adapt their R/3 system to current trends in software development and to meet market needs for speed of development, flexibility, openness, and interoperability. In this paper, we first present SAP's approach to object‐oriented and component‐based technology by describing the Business Framework, the concepts of Business Objects, BAPIs, and the Business Object Repository. On this basis, we then analyze current communication architectures and products enabling the interaction of external Java‐ based software applications with SAP R/3, point out the advantages and disadvantages of different solutions, and finally elaborate on potential strategies and steps for driving the evolution of SAP R/3 in order to further increase interoperability, openness, and flexibility. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We examine the suitability of CORBA based solutions for meeting application requirements in the field of distributed parallel programming. We outline concepts defined within CORBA which are helpful for the development of parallel applications, and we describe which programming techniques are at hand for this purpose. Subsequently, we present an object group service which facilitates the development of CORBA based distributed and parallel software applications. Moreover, we introduce some basic ideas of how the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be used for modeling parallel applications.