A framework for resolution of deployment dependencies in Java']Java-enabled service gateways

Software deployment refers to the set of activities regarding the movement of the software from the development environment to the final delivery environment. These activities cover the release, installation, activation, adaptation, deactivation, update, removal and retirement of software components in a set of hosts. The deployment of services in distributed systems is still an open problem, despite the fact of the several research efforts and standards that have covered this activity in the lifecycle of systems. The substitution of programs by assemblies of components, which is typical of service oriented architectures, has made this situation even worse. In this article, we describe a framework for the resolution of dependencies between services implementations and its application to the Java-based service model for services gateways (OSGi). This framework performs the recursive identification and resolution of dependencies between services in OSGi platforms, including the resolution of native dependencies. The framework requirements and its architecture are presented. It is being applied to an industrial case study about the distributed deployment of services on heterogeneous platforms.