Aggregating, Operating, Sharing and Utilizing Internet-Based Services with the VINCA Approach

Today, when the Internet is concerned, one seldom thinks about the network itself and the TCP/IP suite only. With the boom of Web applications, Internet services, new business models and innovative computing paradigms (e.g. software-as-a-service model and cloud computing), the Internet has evolved into an indispensable social infrastructure and the largest computing platform of the world as well. The Internet-based cyberspace becomes in shape, and its emergence and development may impact our lives fundamentally. On the other side, the processes of software production and operation are still far from optimized. And recently, the IT industry, with its huge power consumption and waste of idle cycles, is increasingly criticized as being non-environment-friendly. Yet another point is concerned about human involvement in computing (or human-machine-synergy). It remains a challenging issue herein how end users can “program” and share their own dependable internet-based applications with cyber services and within virtual communities in cyberspace. In the first part of this tutorial, we discuss the above-stated trends,identify the bottlenecks of the contemporary service computing approaches and Web service technologies, in particular when data and discrete events are concerned, and raise some considerations for further developments.We believe, service-based and multi-tenant cyberspaces have great potentials in reforming the IT realm. This motivated the VINCA initiative, which has been supported by various national funding agencies in China since 2002. In the second part, we present the VINCA approach, with which one can logically partition the Internet-based cyberspace, model and accumulate Internet-based resources,compose value-added services, enable third-party operation of the composed services, monitor services interaction, and ensure dependability; Such issues as architecture and implementation of the VINCA platform are also to be discussed; And finally, we demonstrate the software suite,and some trial-out uses of VINCA with our hand-on experiences in e-health, e-tourism and e-government practices.The targeted audience includes academic peers, software vendors (especially new start-ups focusing on Internet-based data centers and third-party operation) as well as users from vertical domains.