Resource-oriented business process modeling for ultra-large-scale systems

  • Authors:

  • Xiwei Xu;Liming Zhu;Yan Liu;Mark Staples

  • Affiliations:

  • University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Ultra-large-scale software-intensive systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and the resource-oriented viewpoint are considered to be the guiding principles behind the WWW ULS ecosystem. RESTful principles are responsible for many of the desirable ULS quality attributes achieved, such as loose-coupling, reliability, data visibility and interoperability. However, many exiting Web-based or service-oriented applications (WSDL/SOAP-based) only use WWW/HTTP as a tunneling protocol or abuse URL and POX (Plain Old XML) by encoding method semantics in them. These applications are designed as fine-grained distributed Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), breaking many of the REST principles, and are subsequently harmful to the overall ULS system health. The debate on REST versus SOAP-based "Big" Web services has been raging in the industry. We observe that the main problems lie in two areas: 1) conceptually modeling process-centric business applications using a "resource-oriented" viewpoint promoted by the REST principles; and 2) decentralizing a workflow-based business process (e.g. BPEL) into distributed and dynamic process fragments. In this paper, we propose a solution to these two problems. Our approach aligns process-intensive applications with the basic Web principles and promotes dynamic and distributed process coordination.