Large organizations are transitioning their IT activities to a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) style, with business processes supported by software services which interchange messages over the internet. SOA presents significant Software Engineering challenges, in technology selection, service design, application testing, life-cycle maintenance and staff training.
Educators and researchers are hampered by the lack of accessible SOA systems to serve as testbeds. To evaluate concepts and tools, companies and researchers need model systems of realistic scale. Similarly for effective learning, students must be exposed to systems that are comprehensible, but that confront them with realistic challenges.
We describe an initial version of Open SOALab, a SOA Laboratory for use by educators and researchers. Open SOALab consists of a small Currency Exchange composite application that can be used as it is or extended by adding additional components.
Initial resources for researchers include support tools for collecting
global message traces for program comprehension studies. Initial
resources for educators include several proposals for student
assignments, including one fully detailed assignment for teaching about
cloud computing.
* This report may be cited as SERC-TR-297, Software Engineering Research Center, http://www.serc.net, October, 2009.