Web Service Interactions: Analysis and Design

Summary form only given. A fundamental promise of the Web services paradigm lies in the ease of sharing information and resources that are provided in the form of Web processes. A common approach to support such sharing is to allow Web processes to interact through an asynchronous messaging mechanism. This approach lies in the core of many Web services standards (SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, WS-CDL, WSCL ...). In this paper, we examine Web service interaction models and formalizing some of them into the concept of a "conversation" that captures ordering constraints on messages during Web service interactions. We discuss a few technical results based on the conversation model. For example, the use of FIFO queues for incoming messages has a significant impact on conversations, and therefore is an important design decision. We also present technical results concerning static analysis and automated design of Web services in the conversation model