RESUMEN

For applications such as management information systems, customizing the code base to meet each new customer's needs can sometimes be unavoidable. Although good design can minimize the need for such code-level modifications, it can't eliminate it. Moreover, if you don't carefully and accurately manage customizations when they do occur, the result can be skyrocketing development costs, poor customer support, and an inability to respond quickly to new needs. The authors developed a highly automated, model-driven approach for maintaining multicustomer code bases. This approach to the updating process helps control costs, keep the software structure consistent, make changes easier, and improve overall productivity.

RESUMEN

Some experts view service-oriented architecture simply as a stack of XML Web services protocols. From a more conceptual point of view, however, SOA represents a paradigm consisting of a set of architectural principles for building loosely coupled software systems. Actually, the SOA paradigm applies not only to XML Web services but also to other technologies such as email clients and servers and message-oriented middleware. Software patterns can express almost all architecture principles that span SOA technologies. This architecture-centric approach offers the means to understand service-oriented infrastructures and to build SOA applications that meet operational and developmental properties. Additionally, best practice pattern systems and catalogs can be derived from these architectural principles to illustrate how to implement SOA applications effectively and efficiently. Last but not least, an architectural description of SOA helps to change or extend the paradigm when necessary--for example, to address additional problems such as the support of integrative and adaptive SOA approaches. This article is part of a special issue on software architecture