SCA artifact lifecycle.

[Bryan Aupperle <aupperle@us.ibm.com>]

My understanding of the SCA artifact
Lifecycle and the activities that comprise it.



Activities:

Implement: develop implementation artifacts
(code, WSDL document, BPEL documents, etc) including componentTypes (either
explicit files or implicitly via annotations).  An SCA implementation
may provide tools to assist with the authoring of componentTypes.  Build
activities are included here as appropriate.

Assemble:  This covers configuring
components (including implementation.xxx), building composites from components
(including wiring these components together and defining composite services
and references) and creating contributions (including defining any necessary
imports/exports).  An SCA implementation may provide tools to aid
with the various assembly tasks (including validating interface compatibility
for wires)

Deploy:  Add contributions to a
domain (including artifact resolution).  If tools have not been used
in assembly to ensure the SCDL artifacts are valid, validation would need
to be done as part of this activity  Updates may be allowed

Runtime:  Deployed composites process
requests

Undeploy:



Activity order:

Depending on how an application is created,
these activities may occur in the order listed (bottom up development),
or some portion of Assemble may occur first (top down development) where
composite and components are defined using abstract interfaces, then Implementation
is done followed by additional Assemble activities (configuration etc.).



Any header files used for interfaces
are necessary at the time wiring is validated but not at runtime.  It
is not clear to me if the implementation header is ever necessary or is
it sufficient for an SCA runtime to know the executable that implements
a given component (with the interface information from the componentType
providing the class information).  It may be the case that for implementation.cpp
we should only be identifying the executable and componentType file, not
the implementation header and class.


Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D.
STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect
Master Inventor

Research Triangle Park,  NC 
+1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508)
Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com