Towards Dynamic Integration of Heterogeneous web services Transaction Partners
Bilal A. Choudry, Jinli Cao · Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services · 2007
Abstract The business process automation of Web services relies heavily on the ways of transactionmanagement. The proliferation of standards and their lack of interoperability coupled with the lackof dynamic integration mechanisms for transaction partners are the main hurdles for businesstransaction automation. We believe that transaction partner integration should be based on theirsemantic similarities and not on the actual technology used. We present a mechanism fordetermining semantically equivalent transaction partners and introduce an agent based frameworkimplementing their integration. Our approach is based on declarative transaction behaviour. 1. Introduction Web services integrate various business application systems to provide worldwide platform to servecustomers directly over the Internet. Those Web services can be aggregated or composed to formvalue added services. Primary application of composite Web services is for business processautomation. The Web services processes consist of a sequence of business activities, which whencarried out achieve a specific business goal. As the increasing number of business applicationsjoining into the integration, the service activities are growing larger and larger which lead to verycomplex situations. The complex business processes involved by a request may involve manyheterogeneous and autonomous system providers. It is very challenging for Web services to providefunctional support for client’s request as well as provide the services reliably, efficiently andeffectively.In this paper we focus on the problem of providing reliable business transaction capabilities to webservices. The recent work on business transactions implementation for web services has revealedthe distinguishing features of web services make the contemporary distributed systems transactionmanagement techniques inadequate. We believe that conventional web services protocol stack isalso inadequate to provide transaction layer enough support for realizing business transactionexecution. Briefly the inherent problems faced for transaction area include the design time selectionof services for performing business process activities as well as limitations on the selection becauseof a plethora of standards and lack of interoperability between them. We believe that selection ofservices should not be design time and the selection should not be based on the technology or