Transforming Internal Activities of Business Process Models to Services Compositions

As a service composition language, BPEL imposes as constraint that a business process model should consist only of activities for interacting with other business processes. BPEL provides limited support for implementing internal activities, i.e. activities that are performed by a single business process without involvement of other business processes. BPEL is hence not suitable to implement internal activities that include complex data manipulation. There are a number of options to make BPEL able to implement such internal activities. In this paper we analyse those options based on their feasibility, efficiency, reusability, portability and merging. The analysis indicates that delegating internal activities’ functionality to other services is the best option. We therefore present an approach for transforming internal activities to service invocations. The application of this approach on a business process model results in a service composition model that consists only of activities for interaction

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

Can Component/Service-Based Systems Be Proved Correct?

Component-oriented and service-oriented approaches have gained a strong enthusiasm in industries and academia with a particular interest for service-oriented approaches. A component is a software entity with given functionalities, made available by a provider, and used to build other application within which it is integrated. The service concept and its use in web-based application development have a huge impact on reuse practices. Accordingly a considerable part of software architectures is influenced; these architectures are moving towards service-oriented architectures. Therefore applications (re)use services that are available elsewhere and many applications interact, without knowing each other, using services available via service servers and their published interfaces and functionalities. Industries propose, through various consortium, languages, technologies and standards. More academic works are also undertaken concerning semantics and formalisation of components and service-based systems. We consider here both streams of works in order to raise research concerns that will help in building quality software. Are there new challenging problems with respect to service-based software construction? Besides, what are the links and the advances compared to distributed systems?Comment: 16 page

Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

Mediated data integration and transformation for web service-based software architectures

Service-oriented architecture using XML-based web services has been widely accepted by many organisations as the standard infrastructure to integrate heterogeneous and autonomous data sources. As a result, many Web service providers are built up on top of the data sources to share the data by supporting provided and required interfaces and methods of data access in a unified manner. In the context of data integration, problems arise when Web services are assembled to deliver an integrated view of data, adaptable to the specific needs of individual clients and providers. Traditional approaches of data integration and transformation are not suitable to automate the construction of connectors dedicated to connect selected Web services to render integrated and tailored views of data. We propose a declarative approach that addresses the oftenneglected data integration and adaptivity aspects of serviceoriented architecture

Data integration through service-based mediation for web-enabled information systems

The Web and its underlying platform technologies have often been used to integrate existing software and information systems. Traditional techniques for data representation and transformations between documents are not sufficient to support a flexible and maintainable data integration solution that meets the requirements of modern complex Web-enabled software and information systems. The difficulty arises from the high degree of complexity of data structures, for example in business and technology applications, and from the constant change of data and its representation. In the Web context, where the Web platform is used to integrate different organisations or software systems, additionally the problem of heterogeneity arises. We introduce a specific data integration solution for Web applications such as Web-enabled information systems. Our contribution is an integration technology framework for Web-enabled information systems comprising, firstly, a data integration technique based on the declarative specification of transformation rules and the construction of connectors that handle the integration and, secondly, a mediator architecture based on information services and the constructed connectors to handle the integration process