Highly collaborative distributed systems: Synthesis and enactment at work

Summary Service choreographies support a distributed composition approach that is based on the specification of the external interaction of the participant services in terms of flows of message exchanges, given from a global perspective. When developing distributed service-based applications, different services are produced by different teams; at the same time, such choreographies can also interact with third-party services, hence leading to the reuse of black-box services. Enforcing a global coordination logic across the many in-house and third-party services to correctly realize the specified choreography is a nontrivial endeavor. Automatic support is then desirable. In this article, we present an integrated development and run-time environment for choreography-based systems, which covers all the development activities, including specification, code synthesis, automatic deployment, enactment, and monitoring on the Cloud. We focus on providing a practical solution, that is, applicable by the community and considering technological standards used in the industry. We report the results of an experiment that we conducted with a use case in the in-store marketing and sales domain. Results confirm confidence in the approach and show that the platform can be applied in practical contexts.