Architectural translucency in service-oriented architectures

The authors describe the concept of architectural translucency and its applicability in service-oriented architectures (SOAs). They first took at the development of distributed computing from RPC, through middleware, component frameworks to SOAs and their level of support for non-functional properties such as availability, dependability, mobility and adaptivity. Then, they present the concept of architectural translucency - the ability to best influence certain nonfunctional properties by identifying and controlling parameters of the architecture in a cross-layered way. Thus, improvement of mobility, dependability or security aspects can be addressed at the layer that will bring the best optimisation of these aspects. The evaluation insofar as it can be supported in SOA starts with the definition of non-functional properties where translucency is achievable throughout the architecture. Furthermore, a prototype implementation for translucent SOA based on a model that can be evaluated analytically and/or by simulation is presented. The authors have evaluated the prototype implementations for J2EE and for embedded devices using factorial design and present important results. Finally, the progress so far is assessed and an outline of future work is presented.