Defining and coordinating open-services using workflows

Abstract

Recently, workflow technology has been widely accepted as a mean for integrating services to build applications (services). Provided a set of services a workflow is used to coordinate and to synchronize their executions. This paper proposes an approach based on workflow technology and an associated mechanism for defining and coordinating services. Given a service provider that exports a set of methods a workflow can be defined for coordinating calls to such methods, in order to program a service. A service definition is decoupled from the capabilities of the service provider, thus a service may be adapted according to different application requirements. Services coordination is carried out by an orchestrator workflow that provides a fine control on their executions. Definition and coordination are characterized by a set of properties that ensure the correct behaviour of the resulting application (service). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.