SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

Chapter 18. STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS AND MODELING PRINCIPLES: Introduction to Service Structural Notation and Modeling

Structural analysis and modeling is a process pursued by architects, modelers, analysts, developers, and managers to describe a service's internal formation or an external distributed computing environment that consists of deployed services. These structural aspects are depicted by the relationships established between the services and their corresponding consumers, instituted binding contracts, and service coupling styles that "glue" a distributed environment together. The chief driving principles of the structural analysis and modeling are to improve service reusability rates, seek software consolidation opportunities, foster business agility, enable software elasticity, and encourage a loosely coupled distributed landscape. These benefits typically promote superior service structural configuration, deployment, and integration solutions for organizational concerns.

The structural analysis and modeling practice also offers a communication language that is employed to carve out an analysis proposition that depicts the structural foundation of a service. Here the practitioner looks at a service's internal and external construct and applies modeling operations to better satisfy business or technical requirements. Among other influences, this modeling process is also driven by the contextual aspects of a service that are described in detail in Chapters 14 to 17 on contextual ...