Dates : 16 - 17th December '06

Venue : DAIICT, Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

Today we are experiencing a major paradigm shift in the way that software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a newly emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that utilizes services as fundamental elements to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. SOC is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications. SOC involves the service layers, functionality, and roles.

Services are more than just software components; Services are autonomous self-contained, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and deployed for the purpose of developing distributed applications across networks, including the Internet. Service based approaches include Web services, Semantic Web services, and Grid services.

While a service need not fulfill all characteristics of a strong definition of agency, the SOC approach to building complex software systems bears many similarities to the development of agent-based systems. In particular, large systems are assembled from distributed heterogeneous software components providing specialized services and communicating using agreed-upon protocols. Similarly to certain multi-agent engineering paradigms, the design process of such systems focuses on the declarative characterization of the agents' capabilities and on a message-based paradigm of interoperation. Also similarly to multi-agent systems, management of the service provision processes is dynamic and distributed, and takes into account the requirements both at the individual services and system levels of the composed application. It also needs to be adaptive in response to the changing requirements, services and exceptions in the dynamic Web and Grid environments.

Combined with recent developments in the area of distributed systems, workflow management systems, business protocols and languages, services can provide the automated support needed for e-business integration both at the data and business logic level. They also provide a sound support framework for developing complex business transaction sequences and business collaboration applications.

Adopting the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm has the potential to bring about reduced programming complexity and costs, lower maintenance costs, faster time-to-market, new revenue streams and improved operational efficiency.

However, Before the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm becomes reality, there is a number of challenging issues that need to be addressed including among other things service modeling and design methodologies, architectural approaches, service development, deployment and composition, programming and evolution of services and their supporting technologies and infrastructure.

The Intensive Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing to be hosted by DAIICT (Gandhinagar) and jointly organized by IEEE Gujarat Section & IEEE Student Branch of DAIICT is primarily targeted to achieve following objectives:

• To introduce topics to provide an easy transition to a new and emerging paradigm that is widely being used by industry and research community.
• To provide the current state-of-the art in Service-Oriented Computing to the students, practioners and researchers.
• To introduce theoretical concepts, to provide exposure to Eclipse an emerging development environment widely accepted and used among research and software development communities, and to discuss phases involved the development of Web services and Grid services.
• To discuss emerging opportunities, research issues and challenges in the area of Service-Oriented Computing

Workshop is targeted towards sharing knowledge about development and deployment of Web services and Grid services, emerging opportunities and challenges, and core research issues. IEEE Student Branch, DAIICT offers you a rare opportunity to learn the complete breadth and depth of this exciting area in two days by eminent experts from industry and academia like TCS, IBM, Infosys and DAIICT.

This workshop will be beneficial to:

• Software professionals, who want to learn emerging areas of service-oriented computing and development of web/grid services.
• Academicians who are interested in acquiring knowledge about concepts, implementation, research issues and emerging applications of grid computing.
• Undergraduate/Postgraduate students who want to develop strong fundamental understanding and implementation skills in the area of grid computing.