Improving the Static Analysis Conformance of BPEL Engines with BPELlint

Today, process-aware systems are ubiquitous. They are built by leveraging process languages for both business and implementation perspectives. In the typical context of a Web Services-based Service-oriented Architecture, the obvious choice to implement service orchestrations is still the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). For BPEL, a variety of open source and commercial engines have emerged. Although the BPEL standard document defines a set of static analysis rules which should be checked by engines prior to deployment to be standard conformant, previous work revealed that most engines are not capable of revealing all violations of these constraints, resulting in costly runtime errors later on. In this paper, we aim to improve the static analysis conformance of BPEL engines. We implement the tool BPELlint that validates 71 static analysis rules of the BPEL specification, show that the tool can be easily integrated into the deployment process of existing engines, and evaluate its performance to measure the effect on the time to deploy. The results demonstrate that BPELlint can improve the static analysis conformance of BPEL engines with an acceptable performance overhead.