@conference {5959776, title = {An Architectural Style for Liquid Web Services}, booktitle = {9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2011)}, year = {2011}, month = {June}, pages = {232-241}, address = {Boulder, CO, USA}, abstract = {Just as liquids adapt their shape to the one of their container, liquid architectures feature a high degree of adaptability so that they can provide scalability to applications as they are executed on a wide variety of heterogeneous deployment environments. In this paper we enumerate the properties to be guaranteed by so-called liquid service-oriented architectures and define a set of design constraints that make up a novel architectural style for liquid architectures. These constraints drive the careful construction of a pattern, the Restful Actor (Reactor), which enables to deliver the required scalability by means of replication of its constituent parts. Reactors feature a Restful Web service interface and a composable architecture which is capable of delivering scalability and high performance in a way that is independent from the chosen deployment infrastructure. We discuss how the Reactor can be deployed to run on distributed (shared-nothing) execution environments typical of virtualized Cloud computing environments as well as on modern multicore processors with shared memory architectures.}, keywords = {architectural styles, cloud computing, design constraints, liquid service oriented architectures, liquid Web services, multicores, patterns, performance, REST, RESTful actor, RESTful Web service interface, scalability, shared memory architectures, virtualized cloud computing environments, Web services}, doi = {10.1109/WICSA.2011.38}, author = {Daniele Bonetta and Cesare Pautasso} }