Service Encapsulation for Middleware Management Interfaces

Middleware has become the popular runtime infrastructure of modern IT systems. Due to the complex application contexts and various user requirements, more and more applications are now making use of different middleware platforms. It might require the cooperation of several types of middleware, and result in challenging issues for collaborative management of heterogeneous middleware. To solve this problem, it may be a feasible solution to make management interfaces delivered in the form of services and used in service-oriented styles. In this paper, we propose an approach to encapsulating middleware management interfaces into Web services. First of all, we introduce middleware management problems induced by the development of requirements. Then, we present the technical challenges and illustrate the details about how to enable different management interfaces to be in service-oriented styles. Followed by identified technical challenges, we evaluate the approach and primarily discuss how to manage middleware systems collaboratively based on management services.