Development Life Cycle of Web Service-based Business Processes. Enabling Dynamic Invocation of Web Services at Run Time
Dimka Karastoyanova, Alejandro Buchmann · 2004
Web service technology aims at application integration by providing stable service interfaces and standardized communication protocol. However, this is not yet a mature technology; it lacks certain features, among which ability to compose services in the most flexible way. We begin with a comparison of traditional workflow and the existing Web Services-based process technologies; the advantages of the emerging technologies and how they meet the new requirements imposed by both the business and Web services worlds are pointed out. We revise the process life cycle by including additional phases to the traditional division in only build time and run time. This fosters standardization, and allows for modeling adaptable business processes. We concentrate on the dynamic invocation of WSs from within a process instance and present a new way of finding, binding to and invoking WSs during process runtime. For this we introduce an additional run time sub-phase to accommodate the so-called “find and bind” mechanism, which involves policybased selection of services and binding to them at run time. The implications of the “find and bind” mechanism on the process model and the implementation of the execution environment are also discussed.