Rule-Based Coordination of Distributed Web Service Transactions

by Michael von Riegen, Martin Husemann, Stefan Fink, and Norbert Ritter

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are a popular paradigm to implement loosely coupled distributed environments. Within these environments, participants can overcome heterogeneity by communicating through standardized, implementation-independent interfaces. Application logic is typically not located in monolithic programs, but distributed among the participants of processes. Web services are a typical implementation of the SOA paradigm, and services are more and more used to support long-running business processes. This trend runs alongside with a shift from merely considering simple interaction behavior of services, i.e., request-response patterns manifested in standards such as SOAP and WSDL, toward conversational services that engage in long-running conversations with other services. READ FULL ARTICLE (login required) »