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

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Recovery within long running transactions

As computer systems continue to grow in complexity, the possibilities of failure increase. At the same time, the increase in computer system pervasiveness in day-to-day activities brought along increased expectations on their reliability. This has led to the need for effective and automatic error recovery techniques to resolve failures. Transactions enable the handling of failure propagation over concurrent systems due to dependencies, restoring the system to the point before the failure occurred. However, in various settings, especially when interacting with the real world, reversal is not possible. The notion of compensations has been long advocated as a way of addressing this issue, through the specification of activities which can be executed to undo partial transactions. Still, there is no accepted standard theory; the literature offers a plethora of distinct formalisms and approaches. In this survey, we review the compensations from a theoretical point of view by: (i) giving a historic account of the evolution of compensating transactions; (ii) delineating and describing a number of design options involved; (iii) presenting a number of formalisms found in the literature, exposing similarities and differences; (iv) comparing formal notions of compensation correctness; (v) giving insights regarding the application of compensations in practice; and (vi) discussing current and future research trends in the area.peer-reviewe

Reasoning About a Service-oriented Programming Paradigm

This paper is about a new way for programming distributed applications: the service-oriented one. It is a concept paper based upon our experience in developing a theory and a language for programming services. Both the theoretical formalization and the language interpreter showed us the evidence that a new programming paradigm exists. In this paper we illustrate the basic features it is characterized by

A robust client-driven distributed service localisation architecture

The fundamental purpose of service-oriented computing is the ability to quickly provide software resources to global users. The main aim of service localisation is to provide a method for facilitating the internationalisation and localisation of software services by allowing them to be adapted to different locales. We address lingual localisation by providing a service interface translation using the latest web services technology to adapt services to different languages and currency conversion as an example of regulatory localisation by using real-time data provided by the European Central Bank. Units and Regulatory Localisations are performed by a conversion mapping, which we have generated for a subset of locales. The aim is to investigate a standardised view on the localisation of services by using runtime and middleware services to deploy a localisation implementation. We apply traditional software localisation ideas to service interfaces. Our contribution is a localisation platform consisting of a conceptual model classifying localisation concerns and the definition of a number of specific platform services. The architecture in which this localisation technique is client-centric in a way that it allows the localisation to be controlled and managed by the client, ultimately providing more personalisation and trust. It also addresses robustness concerns by enabling a fault-tolerant architecture for third-party service localisation in a distributed setting

Web services recovery mechanisms

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaIn web services context it is not possible to use the usual concept of ACID transactions because of several factors. For instance, business transaction in general have a long duration that can be extended to several months or can involve the coordination and interaction of activities executed by different partners. In these cases, atomicity is not preserved, therefore the usual recovery mechanisms cannot be used, like the rollback. In business transaction, failure treatment can be made by compensation mechanisms in which are defined actions of compensation for the actions that cannot be reverted automatically. The goal of this dissertation is to define a set of patterns that represent the common use of the recovery mechanisms at business level. A graphical notation of easy comprehension will be developed to show how the recovery mechanisms work to all kind of people with different background formation

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation