Composite application

Abstract: A framework and middleware services for developing, deploying and managing composite applications is disclosed. The middleware services may be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. The framework includes a rich collection of middleware services, an application model to compose services into a composite application, a high-density multi-tenant scalable container to host the composition logic, and unified lifecycle management of the composite application and its constituent services.

Abstract: The need for integration of all types of client and server applications that were not initially designed to interoperate is gaining popularity One of the reasons for this popularity is the capability to quickly reconfigure a composite application for a task at hand, both by changing the set of components and the way they are interconnected Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has recently become a popular platform in the IT industry for building such composite applications with the integrated components being provided as Web services A key limitation of solely Web-service-based integration is that it requires extra programming efforts when integrating non-Web service components, which is not cost-effective Moreover, with the emergence of new standards, such as Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the components used in composite applications have grown to include more than just Web services Our work enables progressive composition of non-Web-service-based components such as portlets, Web applications, native widgets, legacy systems, and Java Beans Further, we proposed a novel application of semantic annotation together with the standard semantic Web matching algorithm for finding sets of functionally equivalent components out of a large set of available non-Web-service-based components Once such a set is identified, the user can drag and drop the most suitable component into an Eclipse-based composition canvas After a set of components has been selected in such a way, they can be connected by data-flow arcs, thus forming an integrated, composite application without any low-level programming and integration efforts We implemented and conducted extensive experimental study on the above progressive composition framework on IBM's Lotus Expeditor, an extension of an SOA platform called the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) that complies with the OSGi standard

Abstract: Methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for a framework for composite applications. A computer-implemented framework for a composite application includes an object access layer to exchange data with enterprise base systems and to present the data to a composite application through a uniform interface, a business object modeling layer including a business object modeler to provide a user interface (UI) for constructing a business object, and a service layer to enable services to the composite application, the service layer including a collaboration services module to enable collaboration services to the composite application, the business object modeling layer linking at least one of the collaboration services associated with the business object to the business object.