Eleggua: an event infrastructure for application cooperation

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) is a reality but still faces a lot of challenges to give solutions to problems related to software processes themselves, and problems raised by geographical dispersion. Focusing on the latter, we are interested in building a supporting software development environment to integrate processes and tools. This paper introduces Eleggua, an infrastructure for application cooperation with a central focus on low coupling and loose integration of applications. Eleggua is based on distributed events and Web Services for communication. It also uses Event Condition Action (ECA) rules to describe application cooperation models. The goal of application cooperation is to ensure consistency and integrity of overlapping domain concepts embedded in applications that interact throughout the enactment of business processes. The main restrictions on the design are imposed by the existence of heterogeneous, distributed, legacy systems which are too expensive to modify. Eleggua is being validated in the context of a GSD project1 focused on improving processes of a software house that faces the challenges of geographical dispersion.