Abstract
The current telecommunications scenario requires rapid development of services in the presence of both traditional telecommunications technologies and novel IT technologies. In this scenario, service creation is challenging and should therefore be supported by proper service design notations and service creation tools in a coherent service creation approach. This chapter describes the SPICE approach to service creation. The approach consists of a language that leverages service reuse through platform-independent service composition; tools that support the definition of services, and their deployment to a target service execution environment.
TopThe Spatel Language
To describe SPICE services, a specialized description language named SPATEL has been designed (SPICE Advanced language for Telecommunication services). The approach used is based on the Model Driven Architecture approach (MDA, 2008), as defined by the Object Management Group (OMG, 2008). The purpose of SPATEL is to allow agile development of complex telecommunication services on top of the SPICE architecture leveraging state-of-the-art software engineering techniques such as model-driven engineering and software component technology. Such dedicated formalism supports the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm and includes specificities of the telecom domain like voice dialog support and multimedia data types.
The definition of a domain-specific language for integrated telecommunications services is one of the key elements for improving significantly the agility of the service development process. Various domain-specific languages addressing, for example the orchestration of web services exist nowadays (BPEL, 2003), however, high-level design languages coupling support of state-of-the-art IT technology and telecom specificities are difficult to find.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web Services: Refers to technologies for describing services as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages in the web, and support service definitions that provide documentation for distributed systems and serve as a recipe for automating the details involved in applications communications.
Model-Driven Architecture (MDA): The term is used to define a new way of writing specifications, based on a platform-independent model. A complete MDA specification includes a platform-independent base model, and possibly one or more platform-specific models and interface definition sets, each describing how the base model is implemented.
Domain-Specific Language (DSL): Is a specification or programming language dedicated to a particular problem domain, a specific problem representation technique, and possibly a particular solution technique.
Service Creation Environment: Is defined as a set of integrated tools that support the service creation process.
Telecommunications Services: Refers to any service provided by a telecommunication provider or a specified set of user-information transfer capabilities provided to a group of users by a telecommunication system, where a user is responsible for the information content of the messages and the telecommunication service is responsible for the acceptance, transmission and delivery of the messages.