Sliver: A BPEL workflow process execution engine for mobile devices

Abstract

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the dominant means for expressing traditional business processes as workflows. The widespread deployment of mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones has created a vast computational and communication resource for these workflows to exploit. However, BPEL so far has been deployed only on relatively heavyweight server platforms such as Apache Tomcat, leaving the potential created by these lower-end devices untapped. This paper presents Sliver, a BPEL workflow process execution engine that supports a wide variety of devices ranging from mobile phones to desktop PCs. We discuss the design decisions that allow Sliver to operate within the limited resources of a mobile phone or PDA. We also evaluate the performance of a prototype implementation of Sliver. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.