Specification and Analysis of Adapters for Conversational Services
Kenneth W. Wang, Marlon Dumas, Chun Ouyang · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2007
Abstract. Over its lifetime, a Web service is likely to be reused across several development projects, such that in each of them different interfaces are required from it. Implementing, testing, deploying, and maintaining adapters to deal with this multiplicity of interfaces can be costly and error-prone. The problem is compounded in the case of services that do not follow simple request-response interactions, but instead engage in conversations comprising arbitrary patterns of message exchanges. This paper proposes a language for specifying adapters for conversational services. The language is based on six composable operators that are endowed with a formal semantics defined in terms of Petri nets. The formal semantics is used as a basis to statically check the correctness of the specified adapters. The proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation of an execution engine and a tool that converts adapter specifications into Petri nets. 1