An abstract machine for integrating heterogeneous web applications

The adoption of Cloud Computing technologies by the organizations has profound consequences on the way software applications are developed and used. The migration to the Cloud may be accompanied by the revision of the business process, to integrate tasks over big data. In this way, existing workflow implementations may be extended with calls to operations in Hadoop or other tools. In this work, we define a framework to implement business process over heterogeneous technologies. Our framework is based on a novel workflow engine, called μBP-AM. Workflow execution in μBP-AM is performed by successively transforming the graph obtained from a workflow definition. μBP-AM has a formal semantics, which gives a precise definition of how the workflow is implemented. μBP-AM is at the core of an extensible framework capable of supporting not only Web service operations but also Hadoop operation calls (among others). The tool described here was conceived to increase reliability and to promote interoperability. We describe a prototype implementation of our framework, as well as some experimental results. Experiments using this prototype show that compositions run in μBP-AM using about the same resources as those run by using other tools.