BondFlow: A System for Distributed Coordination of Workflows over Web Services

Today\´s collaborative applications over the web span domains as diverse as enterprise e-commerce applications and biomedical applications. We have previously developed and formally investigated "Web Coordination Bonds," a theoretically powerful artifact for interconnecting autonomous web objects for control and data flows, and for enforcing dependencies. Here, we describe BondFlow, a system that enables the configuration and execution of workflows using web bonds over heterogeneous web objects. The system automatically generates lightweight proxy wrapper objects to enable encapsulated web services to be interconnected through web bonds. The small footprint wrappers (less than 10 KB) can reside on Java-enabled handheld devices. We describe the design, architecture and performance of the Bond-Flow system. Our initial performance results indicate that both wrapper creation time and web bond related execution time are small. In contrast to our BondFlow system, existing systems need expert programming to create workflows, do not easily allow distributed coordination of workflows, and usually do not support heterogeneity of device, data and network. The system is preliminary, and further research is ongoing to extend its configuration and execution platforms.