An AOP based approach to realize an ESB product line : aspect oriented framework for ESB (A04ESB)

Abstract

Nowadays, enterprises are utilizing Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies to automate business processes and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is the current state of art of the EAI technologies. ESB products are heterogeneous in terms of architectures, technologies, and features. Therefore, with an approach that can produce each variation of the heterogeneous ESBs, an ESB vendor can dominate the ESB market. The customer base of the ESB is also heterogeneous in terms of preference technologies, business domains, and application requirements. Each customer domain wants an ESB tailored to its specific attributes to solve their integration problems in a scalable and robust manner. Hence, with an approach that can produce individualized ESB products, an ESB vendor can dominate the ESB market. Apparently, the required approach should possess one important property: mass customization - the ability to create many variations of ESB products. The strategic re-use of assets is the enabler of the mass customization. hence, the commonality and the variability of the ESB products should be realized as reusable software elements. A software development paradigm named Software Product Line (SPL) has emerged to support these requirements and a SPL of the ESB is a suitable approach to exploit the heterogeneity in the ESB product and customer base. The objective of the research presented in this thesis N to propose an approach to realize an ESB product line. The commonalty of the ESB products is mainly ESB services such as routing, transform, security, and monitoring, whereas the variability includes architectures, technologies, and features. This research leverages the concepts of the Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) to identify, separate, and modularize the ESB services that crosscut the heterogeneous ESBs and to exploit the variability suitably to produce each ESB variation. This research presents A04ESB, an aspect-oriented framework that is developed to enable the realization of an ESB product line. The A04ESB consists of an aspect weaver, an aspect library, and an aspect definition language. The aspect weaver takes a newer approach that leverages the Pipe and Filters architectural style to make it suitable for an integration middleware. Furthermore, this research presents an ESB product line proposal and a case study that uses the A04ESB in a real world ESB.