From Object-Oriented to Workflow: Refactoring of OO Applications into Workflows for an Efficient Resources Management in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud Computing delivers to customers computing/storage resources as services via the internet. It is characterized by its elastic nature and its payment model (pay-as-you-go). To optimize the use of these resources, one of the requirements related to this type of environment is to dynamically configure the applications to reduce the costs of their deployment.The dynamic configuration requires the ability to determine which resources are used, as well as when and where they are utilized. This can be done using workflows. In fact, several works rely on workflows to reduce execution costs in the cloud. Unlike workflows, OO applications have an architecture which exposes little or no behavioral (temporal) aspect. Hence, to execute an OO application in the cloud, the entire application needs to be deployed and all its used resources need to be allocated during its entire execution time. To reduce execution costs, we propose a re-engineering process aiming to restructure these applications from OO architectural style to workflow style. In this paper, we focus on the first step of the process which has as a goal generating a workflow from OO source code.