Service design, implementation and description (tutorial)

Abstract

There is an increasingly widespread acceptance of service-oriented architectures as a paradigm for integrating heterogeneous software applications. In this paradigm, independently developed and operated applications are exposed as (Web) services that are then interconnected using a set of standard protocols and languages. While the technology for developing basic services and interconnecting them on a point-to-point basis has attained a certain degree of maturity, there remain open challenges when it comes to building and managing services that participate in interactions that do not follow simple request-response patterns. This tutorial will present a critical overview of current, emerging, and prospective practices in the area of service development, with a focus on design, implementation and description. High-level approaches, including multi-viewpoint design techniques, will be stressed. These high-level concepts will then be linked to lower-level ones, for example by showing implementations (e.g. in BPEL) of higher-level service designs (e.g. in UML). The tutorial will consider service discovery as an essential aspect of service development. Since service discovery is the comparison of the description of a service request with a description of a service offering, the tutorial will review different dimensions of service description as well as corresponding comparison operations. The tutorial will then discuss process-based service description as a basis for enabling the comparison of services from a behavioral perspective. From this tutorial, the attendees can expect to gain an appreciation of the concepts and principles underpinning service development practices, as well as an understanding of the limitations of these practices and how they are being addressed by ongoing research efforts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.