Workshop on Business Processes and Services (BPS'05)
Invited Talk
Title: Service Protocol Adaptation
Speaker: Daniela Grigori (Université de Versailles, France)
Abstract
The push toward business process automation has generated the need for
integrating different enterprise applications involved in such
processes. The typical approach to integration and to process
automation is based on the use of adapters and message brokers
Web services were born as a solution to (or at least as a
simplification of) the integration problem. The main benefit they bring
is that of standardization, in terms of data format (XML), interface
definition language (WSDL), transport mechanism (SOAP) and many other
interoperability aspects. While standardization makes interoperability
easier, it does not remove the need for adapters. In fact, although the
lower levels of the interaction stacks are standardized, different Web
services may still support different interfaces and protocols. Besides
the heterogeneity at the higher levels of the interoperability stack
(e.g., at business protocol level), the need for adapters comes also
from the high number and diversity of clients, each of which can
support different interfaces and protocols, thereby generating the need
for providing multiple faces to the same service.
In this talk, we present a framework for developing Web service
adapters. First, we characterize the problem of adaptation of web
services by identifying and classifying different kinds of adaptation
requirements. Then, we focus on business protocol adapters, and we
classify the different ways in which two protocols may differ. Next, we
describe a methodology for developing adapters for Web services, based
on the use of mismatch patterns and service composition technologies.