Universal and Extensible Service-Oriented platform Feasibility and experience: The Service Abstract Machine

Service-based technology is becoming widespread, and many service oriented platforms are available with different characteristics and constraints, making them incompatible. Consequently, designing, developing and executing an application using services running on different platforms is a challenging task if not impossible. A first challenge is to provide an ideal and virtual SOC platform; ideal because it subsumes the actual real SOA platforms, virtual because it delegates the execution to these real platforms. But since "ideal" depends on the domain; the second challenge is to provide extensibility mechanisms allowing to define what ideal means in a given domain and to provide the engineering support for the design and development of service-based application dedicated to such domains. The paper describes how we addressed these challenges, and to what extent they have been met.