Reasoning about service oriented recursion

Recursion is a well known programming pattern and, even if it is not often used because of its low efficiency, it is always considered as a milestone pattern because it supplies a mathematical foundation for addressing research in the area of computer science. Almost all programming languages provide supports for recursion and the way they address it could be considered as a good point for understanding differences among programming paradigms. In this paper we reason about recursion in the context of service oriented applications. On the one hand we aim at better understanding service oriented programming paradigm w.r.t. the existing ones, whereas on the other hand we aim at introducing new patterns for addressing service oriented application design. As a benchmark for our investigation we exploit the language JOLIE, which provides all the required basic mechanisms for programming service oriented applications. A descendant recursive parser case study will be shown and two service recursive patterns, the recursive distributed computation pattern and the recursive modularization one, will be discussed.