Francisco Curbera

Unraveling the Web services web: an introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI

This tutorial explores the most salient and stable specifications in each of the three major areas of the emerging Web services framework. They are the simple object access protocol, the Web Services Description Language and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration directory, which is a registry of Web services descriptions.

The next step in Web services

How three specifications support creating robust service compositions.

Process Mining Manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language thats capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.

Business Provenance --- A Technology to Increase Traceability of End-to-End Operations

Todays enterprise applications span multiple systems and organizations, integrating legacy and newly developed software components to deliver value to business operations. Often business processes rely on human activities that may not be predicted in advance, and information exchange is heavily based on e-mails or attachments where the content is unstructured and needs discovery. Visibility of such end-to-end operations is required to manage compliance and business performance. Hence, it becomes necessary to develop techniques for tracking and correlating the relevant aspects of business operations as needed without the cost and overhead of a fully fledged data and process reengineering. Our business provenance solution provides a generic data model and middleware infrastructure to collect and correlate information about how data was produced, what resources were involved and which tasks were executed. Business provenance gives the flexibility to selectively capture information required to address a specific compliance or performance goal. Additionally, a powerful correlation mechanism yields a representation of the end-to-end operation that puts each business artifact into the right context, for example, to detect situations of compliance violations and find their root causes.

Bite: Workflow Composition for the Web

Service composition is core to service oriented architectures. In the Web, mainstream composition is practiced in client-side or server-side mashups, such as providing visual widgets on top of Google Maps results. This paper presents an explicit, workflow based composition model for Web applications called Bite. In contrast with prior attempts to bring workflow capabilities to the Web environment, Bite can deal with data integration as well as interactive, asynchronous workflows with multi-party interactions, and is architected to support protocols currently in use by Web applications. The Bite development model is designed for simplicity and short development cycle by taking a scripting approach to workflow development.

Cooperative middleware specialization for service oriented architectures

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) will provide the basis of thenext generation of distributed software systems, and have already gained enormous traction in the industry through an XML--based instantiation, Web services. A central aspect of SOAs is the looser coupling between applications (services) that is achieved when services publish their functional and non-functional behavioral characteristics in a standardized, machine readable format. In this paper we argue that in the basic SOA model access to metadata is too static and results in inflexible interactions between requesters and providers. We propose specific extensions to the SOA model to allow service providers and requestors to dynamically expose and negotiate their public behavior, resulting in the ability to specialize and optimize the middleware supporting an interaction. We introduce a middleware architecture supporting this extended SOA functionality, and describe a conformant implementation based on standard Web services middleware. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of this approach with a detailed real world scenario.

Guest editorial: Business process management: Where business processes and web services meet

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This special issue presents papers, which contribute to the state of the art of BPM, and should be considered as a spin-off of the successful 2005 edition of the International Conference on Business Process Management. In this guest editorial we introduce the four papers in this special issue and comment on recent developments in the broader BPM domain.

Colombo: lightweight middleware for service-oriented computing

Colombo is a lightweight platform for developing, deploying, and executing service-oriented applications. It provides optimized, native runtime support for the service-oriented-computing model, as opposed to the approach of layering service-oriented applications on a legacy runtime. This approach allows Colombo to provide high runtime performance, a small footprint, and simplified application development and deployment models. The Colombo runtime natively supports the full Web Services (WS) stack, providing transactional, reliable, and secure interactions among services. It defines a multilanguage service programming model that supports, among others, JavaTM and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) service composition, and offers a deployment and discovery model fully based on declarative service descriptions (Web Service Description Language [WSDL] and WS-Policy). In this paper we describe these and other aspects of the architecture, design principles, and capabilities of the Colombo platform.

Component Contracts in Service-Oriented Architectures

For SOAs to reach their full potential, the basic interoperable framework must accommodate meaningful quality-of-service contracts. Work on both industry-specific standards and semantic Web services is still needed to fully meet that goal. At the core of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are distributed software components provided or accessed by independent third parties. Because access is not limited to a specific organization, explicit component contracts and universally adopted standards must support third-party access. Although such contracts could cover any technical or business aspect of service interaction, the current focus is on quality-of-service (QoS) policies. From an SOA point of view, we must consider two separate aspects of the use of QoS policies: interoperability between components, which is the subject of the Web services specifications stack; and composition, which composition models, such as the service component architecture (SCA).