Towards an Automated Deployment Planner for Composition of Web Services as Software Components

In this paper, we present our work-in-progress on developing an automated deployment planner for the composition of Web services as software components using the Reo coordination middleware in a distributed environment. Web services refer to accessing services over the Web. Reo is an exogenous coordination model for compositional construction of component connectors based on a calculus of mobile channels that has been developed at CWI (the Netherlands). Reo has a strong theoretical underpinning which makes it a good candidate model for coordinating the work of Web services participating in a composition. Suppose a new Web application has been developed by composing a number of Web services with different requirements and constraints. To run the application, it is required to deploy it on a number of hosts with different computational capabilities available to the application in the distributed environment (e.g., Internet) so that all constraints and requirements are satisfied. Because of the many parameters and constraints in such a deployment problem, it is difficult to do it manually. Thus, an automated deployment planner is required for this purpose.