Checking conformance between business processes and Web service contract in service oriented applications

Abstract

A key challenge to widespread adoption of service oriented architectures and supporting Web services technologies is the issue of maintaining consistency of interacting, long running, autonomous business processes that constitute distributed applications, in the presence of application level failures, concurrent activities and other exceptional events. One of the main sources of inconsistency is the non-conformance between business processes and their external behaviors, expressed through service contracts. Today, the onus is on the programmers to write complex code to handle such non-conformance due to shortcomings in supporting tools and technologies. This paper addresses this problem in the context of consistency requirements, firstly, by describing the relationships between the business process workflow and Web service contracts, and then by providing a prototype tool that checks the conformance between them.