The purpose of this study is to present guidelines that can be followed when introducing Service-oriented architecture through the use of Web services. This guideline will be especially useful for organizations migrating from their existing legacy systems where the need also arises to consider the financial implications of such an investment whether it is worthwhile or not. The proposed implementation guide aims at increasing the chances of IT departments in organizations to ensure a successful integration of SOA into their system and secure strong financial commitment from the executive management. Service oriented architecture technology is a new concept, a new way of looking at a system which has emerged in the IT world and can be implemented by several methods of which Web services is one platform. Since it is a developing technology, organizations need to be cautious on how to implement this technology to obtain maximum benefits. Though a well-designed, service-oriented environment can simplify and streamline many aspects of information technology and business, achieving this state is not an easy task. Traditionally, management finds it very difficult to justify the considerable cost of modernization, let alone shouldering the risk without achieving some benefits in terms of business value. The study identifies some common best practices of implementing SOA and the use of Web services, steps to successfully migrate from legacy systems to componentized or service enabled systems. The study also identified how to present financial return on investment and business benefits to the management in order to secure the necessary funds. This master thesis is based on academic literature study, professional research journals and publications, interview with business organizations currently working on service oriented architecture. I present guidelines that can be of assistance to migrate from legacy systems to service-oriented architecture based on the analysis from comparing information sources mentioned above.

This thesis compares the performance of Web Services when hosted on either the J2EE or the .NET platform. The thesis will investigate which platform should be choosen to host Web Services mainly based on performance.

SOA and especially Web services are a big evolving market these days. SOA typically uses Web services when interacting between different parts of applications. Methods to easily discover the Web services must exist. For this UDDI has been introduced. The current implementation of UDDI has a weak security model. We have developed an extension to this model, which interacts with the current solution to make it more secure. Our solution, S-UDDI, enable a way to find and publish Web services in a secure and trustworthy way.

This thesis provides an overview of Web Services technology. The concept of Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture are explained. The thesis focuses on the mechanisms for transporting and addressing messages in web services, especially SOAP. It presents the development history of SOAP, an overview of the SOAP 1.2 specification, and the differences between SOAP in version 1.1 and 1.2. Further, the thesis presents two web servers for development and deployment of web services using Java and .NET technology, i.e. Bea Weblogic Server 9.2 and Internet Information Services 7.0. The web server implementations are evaluated both in terms of conformance to the SOAP specifications as well as their performance (response time and throughput). The results showed that the servers performed very similar both for SOAP 1.2 and SOAP 1.1 messages. The response times and throughput are similar for both servers in most cases. There are, however, situations when Weblogic perform significantly worse than IIS, and when IIS is noticeable worse than Weblogic. The thesis presents also general security aspects of sending messages.

This thesis describes the development of a SOA-based architecture for integrating large EDI-using manufacturing companies purchasing processes with smaller non-EDI capable manufacturing companies, using online services. The underlying need for this project lies with the fact that these small manufacturing companies risk to miss out on business, due to their inability to communicate via the industry standard EDI format. At the same time, getting EDI-capable involves significant investments in software licenses, connectivity services and consulting or training that these small companies may not be ready to make. The mentor company of this thesis project, System Andersson, produces resource planning software for this type of companies and would like to be able to provide them with an easy to use way of “jacking in” EDI support into their businesses, without having to make such significant investments. Ideally this feature would be developed as a standalone subscription based service that could be provided to users in such a way that their existing System Andersson software could connect to it and no further hard- or software would be needed on site. This EDI-enabling should be as easy as to be entirely transparent for the end-user companies. The task handed to the author was thus to develop an architecture for how such a subscription based service could be developed. Furthermore, in order to promote re-use and simplify development, the architecture was to be based on SOA concepts. As a result of the project, such an architecture has been developed. The architecture details two services for translating and storing for later delivery a number of EDI message types of the EDIFACT variety. The architecture also specifies communications protocols (SOAP over HTTPS and AS2 over HTTPS) and APIs (web services) for how to communicate with these services. These specifications can be used to implement a system that performs the necessary integration, so that the smaller companies may indeed communicate via EDI. The fitness of the developed architecture has been tested by implementing a prototype version of such a system based on it. It has also been validated by way of comparing to how well it adheres to SOA design principles. All in all, this design appears to be quite sound and presents a working solution to the studied problem.

Through the entry of web 2.0 the technologies behind web development has changed dramatically. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is the umbrella term for different techniques that make it possible to build rich and interactive user interfaces in today’s web browsers. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) describes how common services can be bundled and published so they can be consumed by different systems. The company SYSteam Evolution AB, which has requested this project, wanted a web application that shows a graphical activity chart in order to easier view ongoing projects. The goal for this project is to develop a demo platform that shows how AJAX and SOA can be used to create flexible and reusable applications. To reach the goals, many different frameworks and technologies need to cooperate and work together. This report will describe the different technologies that have been used and explain the different steps in the development job. The result of the work has lead to a demo platform that uses many different technologies to show a graphical activity chart. The job requestor and the author are very pleased with the result of the work. / Genom intåget av web 2.0 har teknologierna bakom webbutveckling ändrats drastiskt. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) är samlingsnamnet på ett antal tekniker som gör det möjligt att bygga rika och interaktiva applikationer i dagens webbläsare. Tjänsteorienterad arkitektur, ”Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) talar om hur gemensamma tjänster paketeras och publiceras så att de kan konsumeras av olika system. Uppdragsgivaren till detta examensarbete är företaget SYSteam Evolution AB. Företaget vill ha en webbapplikation som visar en grafisk aktivitetskarta för att enklare kunna överblicka pågående projekt. Målet med arbetet är att ta fram en demoplattform som visar hur AJAX och SOA kan användas för att skapa flexibla och återanvändbara applikationer. För att lyckas med uppdraget måste olika ramverk och teknologier kombineras och fungera tillsammans. Denna rapport kommer att förklara de olika teknikerna som använts, samt även förklara de olika stegen i utvecklingsarbetet. Resultatet av arbetet har utfallit i en demoplattform som använder många olika teknologier för att visa grafisk aktivitetskarta. Uppdragsgivare och uppdragstagare är mycket nöjda med resultatet av arbetet.

In silico experiments in the field of bioinformatics generate large amounts of data since most of the tasks are done in an exploratory fashion. Workflows are one of the many tools used by scientists to model complex tasks.The interoperability of data generated from these tools plays an important role in improving the efficiency of such tools and also in verifying results from other experiments.We aim to compare workflow systems by integrating bioinformatics data in Vistrails and Taverna. We also look at how the two systems use the open provenance model that has been developed to bring provenance interoperability. We developed web services to perform similar functions of some workflows in Vistrails. With the services we were able to perform most of the tasks we planned using both systems. Differences in how lists of items are processed in the two systems results in differences in how workflows are composed in the two systems. In Taverna there is implicit iteration and Vistrails requires the use of additional modules to perform iteration.There are also differences in the execution times of workflows using web services, with workflows in Taverna taking longer than their counterparts in Vistrails. There are some similarities in the execution pattern of workflows if same workflow is invokedmultiple times, with the first invocation taking longer time than the subsequent ones.

Context: Cloud Computing has advanced in recent years. It is catching people’s attention as a commodious resource of computational power. Slowly, Cloud is bringing new possibilities for a scientific community to build High Performance Computing platforms. Despite the wide benefits the Cloud offers, the question on everyone’s mind is “Whether the Cloud is a feasible platform for HPC applications”. This thesis evaluates the performance of the Amazon Cloud using a sorting benchmark. Objectives: 1. To investigate all the previous work on HPC that has been ported to the Cloud environment in various fields. Also, the problems and challenges are assessed relevant to HPC associated with the Cloud. 2. A study is done on how to implement parallel Quicksort efficiently to obtain good Speedup. 3. A parallel Quicksort is developed and its performance is measured using ‘Speedup’ by deploying in the Cloud. Methods: Two different research methods were used to carry out the research. They are Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a Quantitative methodology. Research papers from academic databases namely IEEE Xplore, Inspec, ACM Digital Library and Springerlink were chosen for conducting SLR. Results: From the systematic review undertaken, 12 HPC applications, 9 problems and 5 challenges in the Cloud were identified. Efficient way to implement the parallel Quicksort on the Cloud has been identified. From the experiment results, a low Speedup is obtained in a Cloud environment. Conclusions: Many HPC applications which were deployed in the Cloud so far were identified along with problems and challenges. Message Passing interface (MPI) is chosen as the efficient method to develop and implement the parallel Quicksort in the Cloud. From the experiment results, we believe that the Cloud is not a suitable platform for HPC applications.

Geoinformatics field of science becomes more and more important nowadays. This is not only because it is crucial for industry, but it also plays more important role in consumer electronics than ever before. The ongoing demand for complex solutions gave a rise to SOA1 architecture in enterprise and geographical field. The topic that is currently being studied is interoperability between different geospatial services. This paper makes a proposal for a master thesis that tries to add another way of chaining different geospatial services. It describes the current state of knowledge, possible research gap and then goes into the details on design and execution part. Final stage is the summary of expected outcomes. The result of this proposal is a clearly defined need for a research in the outlined area of knowledge. / Contact details: email: dawidnejman@gmail.com phone: +48 511-139-190

Context: Cloud computing is reshaping the service-delivery and business-models in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The Information Technology (IT) sector has benefited from it in the previous 3-5 years. Despite the attraction of cloud computing, it is required to have an effective application migration strategy. Cloud computing with its diverse provisioning models makes it possible for telecom vendors and service providers to decide effective service and business models. Currently, cloud computing contains security, performance and dimensioning considerations for telecom companies. Objectives: This thesis assesses the trends and issues associated with the cloud, with telecommunications perspective, while leveraging the cloud to come to a decision on a suitable cloud environment for telecom grade applications. Analysis of maturity of public cloud (in terms of compatibility, consolidation, compliance and standardization) in general and Amazon cloud in particular, is part of the thesis objective. While doing so, deployment of a telecom-grade product in the Amazon cloud will be evaluated against the current on-premise deployment. We want to identify architectural difference between the two domains, and what issues are faced when a migration is planned. This evaluation between two systems, i.e. on-premise and the cloud will significantly contribute to the research and can be used when making business decisions. Methods: We conducted literature review, survey, and a case study, assessing the above mentioned objectives. Research papers from academia and industry were chosen for literature review; personnel, with experience in cloud computing, were chosen for the survey; and a telecom-grade platform was used to assess the migration issues on Amazon cloud in the case study. The Ericsson Composition Engine (ECE) was used to check what deployment issues it can have on Amazon cloud. Its on-premise Reference Deployment Architecture was compared with the cloud-based Reference Deployment Architecture. This case study served as a confirmation to results obtained in the literature review and survey. Results: In the literature review and survey, we found motivations, trends, current applications, and challenges of cloud computing for telecom. It was found from the case study that Amazon Web Services (AWS) lacks application and network centric attributes that are required in ECE deployment. We propose recommendations that can be integrated with ECE while deploying it in a public cloud. Conclusions: Companies are choosing cloud vendors that uniquely give ease of migration and control, based on application needs and compatibility. ECE cannot be directly migrated to AWS, unless we provide Amazon specific modifications in the architecture. The survey and literature review support a private and/or hybrid strategy for ECE, along with the inclusion of cloud networking into the ECE package.