A Pattern for Interconnecting Distributed Components

Nowadays, enterprises express huge needs for mechanisms allowing interconnection of their business components. Due to the weakness of component integration facilities, a large amount of research and development has been made in this area. Nevertheless, developed mechanisms are generally hard-coded, proprietary and lack a high level of abstraction. This paper presents our contribution to the design, the implementation, and the experimentation of an architectural pattern named “Service”. This pattern is able to support interconnection and cooperation between distributed components independently of their specific contexts (workflow processes, database robots, agents, networks nodes, etc.). Our “Service” pattern proposes a generic solution to interconnection and cooperation between components through object oriented structures and scenarios. The essence of the pattern is the ability for ”Service” to provide registration, discovery, negotiation and dynamic API information on behalf of a contained service. Moreover, several alternatives are presented to implement our pattern.